Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice 2.0 Preview Release
gmuslera writes "A preview release of
OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released, which has new
features like better MS-Office compatibility, an Access-like program and a more. Here is a review
of it with screenshots and how it performs. It's work in progress, maybe not recomended for production sites, but it is a good sample of what is coming."
They are looking for people to help on the project that is going to create the OS X native support. Head on over there if you want to help out. Should be an interesting project.
"Access-like" is more specific. If they had just said "database" it could have been a wider range of applications. "Access-like" specifies that it's used like access.
MySQL is a database, yet I hardly think you'd call it "access-like".
This might answer some of your questions:
http://wp.openoffice.org/
FRom what I've seen poking around the site, native Aqua/OSX support didn't quite pan out for 2.0 the way it was supposed to. It looks like it still requires an X server, and still uses its own toolkit instead of aqua or a smart approximation.
Neooffice/J was the proof of concept to bring OO 1.x to the Aqua system. It looks like they made some progress - using Aqua widgets and controls in some places, but only a few, and doing away with the need for an X server. But it doesn't look like they've gotten much farther than that, or readied 2.0 to be aqua-native. That's a shame.
Disclaimer: I am one of the community members of the Mac OS X OOo "team" and founder of the NeoOffice project
It will probably be a while before you can even see X11 support for 2.0. Eric just got the 2.0 X11 based code to *compile* for the first time yesterday and it won't even run as setup crashes.
Part of the problem is that OpenOffice.org really isn't a "team"...it's primarily Sun Microsystems. Sun has four priorities: Linux x86, Windows, Solaris, and Solaris x86. Sun pays no one to work on Mac OS X support. Since it isn't one of their priorities, they frequently code without keeping the special needs of Mac OS X in mind, doing stupid things like hard-coding shared library extensions to only be ".dll" or ".so", neither of which are used by Mac OS X. They can't claim ignorance since folks have been trying to write Mac OS X code for over three years now, but yet they still don't even keep simple compatibility needs like that in mind.
Getting true native support for OOo without X11 on Mac OS X is most likely not going to happen within the OpenOffice.org project. All of our native work has been going on in the NeoOffice/J project. It uses a mixture of Carbon and Java to run using ATSUI for native fonts and Quartz for native drawing and printing. We also use full GPL licensing so we can incorporate the good work of contributors who can't get their translations and patches into OOo due to licensing and politics.
The process of giving it Aqua widgets has already begun. The latest 1.1 Alpha patches use native Mac OS X menubars. Aquafication is slow, though, because our first priority is to make it functional first, then make it pretty second. It doesn't matter if it looks pretty if it crashes after 5 minutes!
For what it's worth, it's already taken over two years just to get NeoOffice/J to the point where the native Mac OS X support is functional. By functional I mean that it can copy and paste both formatted text and images with other Mac OS X applications, has correct fonts and font layouts, functions with most all of the Mac OS X printer drivers, launches properly from the finder, works with the scrollwheel on those funky mice some Mac users have, has an integrated WordPerfect filter, uses the Apple Installer, has automatic upgrade notification, automatically translates the interface based upon your preferred language in the System Preferences language pane, etc.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 X11 has no native non-X11 support in it, much less the level of integration with Mac that we've achieved with NeoOffice/J. It's taken two years of some really dedicated engineers (namely, Patrick) to get NeoJ up to that stage. Replicating all of that work within OOo will probably take nearly that long and perhaps longer if the experts aren't there to help.
NeoOffice/J is in fact OpenOffice.org 1.1.2, and is 97% identical on a source code level. It's even got bug fixes that aren't in the OOo GM (such as functional JDBC support). This week we're going to be taking NeoOffice/J to 1.1 Beta after all known crashing and deadlocks have been fixed. And...
NeoOffice/J 1.1 Beta will be based off of OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, which isn't even available for Mac OS X X11!
Just keep up to date on the latest Mac OS X porting news on trinity instead of the infrequently updated OOo pages. RSS feeds are available too.
And don't let all of the politics and scare tactics of the OpenOffice.org denziens scare you either. NeoOffice really is the 'official' place for Mac OS X native OpenOffice.org and is where all of us core developers work (Patrick, Dan, and Ed).
ed
Disclaimer: I am one of the members of the Mac OS X OOo team and a founder of the NeoOffice project
OpenOffice.org X11 on the mac is effectively dead because it is horrendously understaffed. There are less then 5 people actively working on it. Not good for an 8 million line + application.
While Apple's developer documentation may be first class, OpenOffice.org X11 is not built using Apple-specific technologies. It is built from the command line and is using X11 with its own internal widget toolkit. Oh yeah, and takes 9 hours to compile on a dual G5 2GHz. That hurdle is a bit too high for just someone to stroll on in and casually check out the project.
OpenOffice.org is a large and thorny Unix application. There are very few Mac OS X programmers that actually have X11 and Unix skills and the patience to deal with something of its size. Most developers come to the project and are like "can I build it in XCode" or "can I use InterfaceBuilder", find out they can't and then leave. The lack of a sufficiently large pool of skilled volunteer programming experts effectively killed OOo on the Mac from the start.
The native work has effectively moved to the NeoOffice/J project, which is 95% code identical to OpenOffice.org and uses Carbon and Java instead of X11. It still doesn't use Apple development tools directly, but it does have two of the original developers of OOo Mac OS X working on it continuously.
ed
and many many more things. All of those tasks are huge. The first wasn't an issue for Linux but the rest were, and the work has been done primarily by Red Hat and Novell working together, as well as volunteers from the Linux community.
It probably helps that on Linux, people just got down to work and started fixing things, with the result that OO now tracks native themes in both GNOME and KDE, has a complete native Industrial icon theme (by the same Ximian artists that did the original GTK+/GNOME artwork), integrates with the native file pickers, gnome-vfs, and starts quickly (prelink and the GCC symbol visibility work was motivated largely by OO).
In contrast, whenever OO is mentioned on Slashdot all I see are comments bitching at the developer team and stupid (wrong) statistics being thrown around in an attempt to convince Sun to do the work even though they have no interest or need for it. Because, you know, Mac users are special so they shouldn't need to do the work themselves. The NeoOffice guys are the only ones I know of that are actually getting serious stuff done, and they seem to be years away from getting something that works well.