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."

Comments

OO.o still requires X11

[Vandil X]

As much as I enjoy using OO.o, I really hope an OSX-native version comes out some day.

A lot of people who install OSX for themselves never get around to installing X11.

Re:OO.o still requires X11

[otuz]

The native version is postponed to the 2.0 release.
It will be released in late 2005 or early 2006.

Re:OO.o still requires X11

[.com b4 .storm]

I'd like to point out that there is a semi-native hack for OpenOffice called NeoOffice. It wraps OpenOffice in Java, which means you don't need to run X11 first, you can use native key bindings for everything, the system clipboard works properly, and (best of all) the native OS X print system is used.

Sure, the UI is still an ugly Windows-esque menu-in-the-window scheme, but it's better than nothing. :) I've been using it for my work and school papers, and found it to be as stable as an official OpenOffice build for OS X. It also seems to be a lot faster... initial startup time (because of Java) is as crappy as ever, but once it's running, it's a lot smoother.

RealPlayer is actually quite nice

[TomorrowPlusX]

You know, we all here have a tradition of saying nasty things about Real player...

Well, I want to stand up, stick my neck out, and say "Sorry! You guys seem to have made up for it!"

As a Cocoa programmer who just doesn't understand why big companies don't dive in and *properly* port their software, I'm impressed that Real has written what seems to be a real, honest-to-god cocoa app. The preferences window is a *real* Mac OS X prefs window. The app behaves like a proper document-based app, where the program won't shut down if you close all the files. And so on, and so on; I'm really impressed.

And, while I have no idea what it's like on windows ( I haven't touched a windows box in at least a year ), real player is being quite nice about not stealing your file associations, unlike what I remember a few years ago on Win2K. It doesn't hide anything as far as I can tell, and the default associations are not only few, but reasonable.

Good show, real. I think I'm *finally* going to pay for your product.

Re:RealPlayer is actually quite nice

[TomorrowPlusX]

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 ).

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/TooCom pl ex3.png
[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.

Hope Oracle actually ships it

[wandazulu]

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.

There is no Java in OOo

[soullessbastard]

(Disclaimer: I'm the lead volunteer for OOo Mac OS X)

There is no Java in OpenOffice.org. It is just horribly inefficient C++. The only time Java is used in OOo Mac OS X is during the build process to validate some XML configuration documents; at runtime it doesn't need Java at all. That's why it's possible to run on DarwinPPC even though you can't compile it on DarwinPPC.

Remember, it wasn't written by Sun, but by Star Division. It was started back in the mid to early 1990s and was definitely back in the day before the AWT was anywhere near stable or cross platform. It may have even been started before Java, but I'm unsure of the timelines.

ed