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Friday Mac Release Roundup
An anonymous reader writes "The new RealPlayer 10 beta was released for Mac OS X. It's got a built-in web browser built off Apple's WebKit. This, along with all the Mac-specific UI tweaks, makes for a pretty solid release overall, imho."
lucadex writes "Open Office 1.1.2 has been officially released on Mac OS X. This is the first official O.O. upgrade since version 1.0.3."
Tom Davies writes "Oracle has released an early adopter's release of 10g for Mac OS X."
adamhauner writes "Mozilla.org released final version of Camino 0.8, a Gecko-based browser optimized for Mac OS X with a Cocoa user interface. This version, besides having other new features, also upgrades the Gecko HTML rendering engine from Mozilla 1.0 to Mozilla 1.7."
I want to add something regarding porting software to native mac OS X. Last year I ported a program I've been working on which allows for development of behavioral AI for robots in a relatively nice physics simulated environment. The whole thing isn't that big, about 50 kloc, ( not including the physics engine, which I got from http://ode.sf.net ).
m pl ex3.png
Anyway, when I ported it from Qt/KDE on linux, I decided to go native, and wrote a full cocoa gui.
http://home.earthlink.net/~zakariya/files/TooCo
[the filename refers to my current project to refactor the gui]
Not only was it not hard at all, but the overall design of cocoa makes separation of core logic from presentation relatively easy. My simulation, my core APIs and so on were completely unchanged. All I really did was write some new interface code. In fact, Cocoa made it so damn easy my Gui became richer and and order of magnitude more complete.
My smooth and comfortable experiences doing this make me frustrated when I see shoddily written ports to Mac OS X. Cocoa is like mana from heaven. You get to keep your core C/C++ and just make a binding to the UI. Who can complain about that? Plus you get to use one of the most beautiful procedural languages available ( IMNSHO ) Objective-C.
Anyway, that's just my 2 cents.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
The NeoOffice/J version of OO is much more OS X integrated than the main OO.o. It is still dependent on x11 but it allows cutting and pasting with other applications outside of x11 and runs much faster. The reason for OO.o's slowness is not x11, it's JAVA. Try out The GIMP in x11 on OS X. It's quite snappy, even on my 400 Mhz G3 PowerBook (Pismo). In fact, it seems faster than Photoshop 7 for some operations. I suppose that it would be better not to depend on x11 because it would allow for a UI more familiar to the average Mac user and because of the extra install but NeoOffice/J is quite usable.
I'm not sure that OO.o's slowness has anything to do with Java or X11, it's just slow. It's slow under Linux and under Windows and was slow when it was StarOffice and had nothing to do with Java. I suspect over time the code is going to be reviewed and this particular issue resolved.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I'm not sure I completely understand (I might be totally off on this), but if you're printing that postscript file from the same Mac, couldn't you just save it as a PDF from the print menu, and bypass the middleman?
I was really burned when Oracle failed to deliver a production quality "we stand behind it" version of 9i for OSX. I had been trying to convince my bosses that OSX could be a real contender for our back-office apps because not only was it an industrial-strength Unix, but that it also had Oracle (which is our DB).
They said they'd wait till it actually shipped, but it never did. There's a ton of stuff Apple provides with the XServe that we could use (XSan definately springs to mind), but whereas we don't do cool rendering or whatnot, we want the boxes for more mundane, database-driven stuff.
On this I sort of blame Apple too, they seem to push the XServes as great for scientific or graphics crunching, but seem to neglect the possibility that their hardware could be used for decidely less sexy roles like serving up text-based data to thousands of users. I am *this* close to convincing the powers-that-be that not every Mac has to run Photoshop, but without the database (specifically Oracle), it won't even be considered.
Ok, I love Aqua. My main gripe about Firefox is that it uses GTK widgets and not native Cocoa widgets.
I've given both Camino and Safari their due attention and a very fair chance to become my default browser. Safari gets an extra point because I like the brushed metal. Camino gets an extra point because of type-ahead find. But so far nothing beats the AdBlock extention for Firefox.
If could get AdBlock type blocking on Safari I'd finally make the full leap.
What's bizarre is that the middle button works in Safari, despite the whole one button mouse policy. I'd like to know if Steve Jobs actually uses an Apple mouse :)
English is easier said than done.
Since you like Cocoa, you might also want to look at GNUStep on the GNU/Linux and *N*X side of things. It attempts to provide the next-step-after-OpenSTEP UI toolkit, and even brings some of the Cocoa APIs as well.
Best of all, I hear taking code from it to OS X is just a quick recompile for a native experience, which is always nice. You can see screenshots of a app that does just that here.
I have bought pure java office suite (thinkfree) as I got fed-up with OO problems (really, tried and tired)
:) Also made some evil tests while I was on trial, e.g. downloaded 400 page word docs, reformatted them etc, no speed problem while running.
It launches faster than X11 OpenOffice or MS Office
So, your point must be right. Also if I understand it right (not a developer here) only "fast" launch time will happen when they move to 2.0 , e.g. native so it will be prebinded.
OO.o people, if you want to impress Mac users and really set an END to MS Office tyranny on Mac, go native. Real native I say. More native than MS Office even.