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

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.

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.