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NeoOffice/J 1.1 Finally In Beta
VValdo writes "Hot on the heels of yesterday's vigorous debate re OpenOffice.org for OS X, the 1.1 beta of NeoOffice/J is now available. Based on Oo.o 1.1.3, improvements include native Mac menus, scroll wheel support, text drag-and-drop, smaller PDFs, new icons, localization for 40 languages, automatic update notification, and much more. No X11 server required!"
Great start (and work) but, as a mac user, it still looks like shit compared to OfficeX or any other native OS X application. Hint: Use native wiggets.
There's a universal fear of Java due to experience with poorly coded apps in the past. (*cough*Limewire*cough) But I can honestly say that is unfounded when it comes to NeoOffice/J.
Example: Start up time from double-click to document window for NeoOffice/J is 10 seconds. Start up time for MS Word is 14 seconds on my 1.5GHz 15" Powerbook G4 w/ 1GB of RAM.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
The translation is rather: "Don't ask stupid questions - we might answer good ones, though".
While the link in the story is to the English download pages, the site itself has the download instructions, FAQ, and other pages available in Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Japanese. You can use the language links at the top of the page or link to the language-agnostic download link which will redirect you automatically to the correct language based upon your browser user-info string.
ed
...the external bit-blasting and event code is in Java. Basically it's using an X11 to Java translator. The rest, as I gather, is simply OpenOffice.
Don't forget that OpenOffice.org itself is huge, and it is a C++ application. It's actually a beautiful example of how horridly slow C++ can get, both running and compiling. NeoOffice/J is just OpenOffice.org with some extensions.
;)
I did a line count analysis a while back in response to some FUD spreading, but it's probably still roughly accurate. On a source code level, less then 2% of NeoOffice/J is actually Java. 98% of the code is straight from OpenOffice.org. And not all of the NeoOffice/J code is in Java, so the actual figure is probably less then that.
On a binary level, the size of the combined JAR files for NeoOffice/J and OpenOffice.org are only 3.7 MB of the application's 317 MB footprint. And those JAR files include the support OOo has for Java applets, DocBook filters, and the like. The "Java" magic NeoOffice/J adds to OpenOffice.org is essentially contained in a single file "vcl.jar", which is 70k. I'm sure someone can do those percentages themselves as I left my RPN calculator at home
ed
At one point in antiquity, both J and C were prototypes. C was really a hack to explore technologies, but J was engineered a bit more carefully. The idea was eventually that OOo X11 would yield to the short-term solution of J to the long term solution of C.
Unfortunately, Cocoa was just too difficult to fit to the OOo event model. While I hacked and struggled with Cocoa until he smote my ruin upon the mountainside, the Java+Carbon of J the amazing engineering of Patrick and his testing crew was triumphant and created a stable, functional app. When it comes down to it, redoing all that work in Cocoa is just reinventing the wheel for no tangible benefit aside from pure geek thrills. Even if done, the result still wouldn't be using ObjC, Interface Builder, or any of the other tools that make Cocoa so scrumptious. It'd be the penultimate Cocoa hack job. Doing OOo in Cocoa is kind of like trying to ram a square peg into a round hole. Cocoa suffers from the fatal flaw of all framework technologies; they really don't work well for building apps that are not engineered to conform to the framework design.
Frustrated with Cocoa, the decision I came to was to shelve C for a while and go join Patrick and help him bring Aqua into J, stop splitting our efforts, and combine to make a kickass app. Thus the Aqua menus were born with the other widgets to come. Eventually when J is finished, I am hoping to find time to take the "core" parts of J out and wrap them into a framework that can then be embedded into Cocoa apps, similar to the Gecko engine. That's a long way off yet...
For more of my own logic read a more detailed discussion about why J is the best engineering choice for now.
ed
Unfortunately that file format hasn't been reverse engineered yet. We're not focusing on doing the reverse file format engineering ourselves. We just don't have the resources (two programmers!) to focus on the old Mac file formats, or even the new Mac file formats like Keynote. I wrote some design specs to get developers started if you're curious, but I haven't had the time to do engineering for those features.
The only "old school" Mac app that has had its format engineered is the old Mac WordPerfect, thanks to the OOo WordPerfect filter team. They integrated their code into NeoOffice/J and now we can sort of open the old Novell/Corel WordPerfect 3.5 formatted files. Note this still doesn't give you "show codes", just the files. I think the old MacLink Plus may have had a Word 5.1 to WP translator, though, so that might be a way to get at your legacy docs even if it is convoluted as all hell.
ed
Agreed that the tone of the FAQ needs a bit of work, but the folks involved are definitly a pleasure to work with. I ran into a bug with a previous release where Neo/J was crashing and one of the developers (Patrick) worked with me for a couple days so he could patch the bug in the installer that caused this.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
Although it's not on the main download page yet, we also do have a torrent available for the main installer:
1 .1_Beta.torrent
http://trinity.neooffice.org/torrents/NeoOfficeJ-
There are only a couple of seeders right now, but if the mirrors slow to a crawl the torrent may be a better choice.
ed
OO.org 1. series is dependant on either the Windows GUI or an X -server.
OO.Org 2 series is supposed to make a tranistion to Aqua easier.
NeoOffice is a quick port designed to get people up to speed.
I run OO.org 1.2 under OS X and X and it takes a long time to load up. Of course it has to start the X server, then load Open Office, then the document, and it looks ugly. But it does work.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
couple of things.
one, yes it is a memory hog, but that is a part of OO.o, not the port. The Neo-guys port the software, they don't write it (99% of the code is pure OO.o code)
second, this is a breakthrough. OO.o 1.1 without X11, native printing, aqua menues, wordperfect converters (which windows OO.o does NOT have).
also, if you are basing your experience on 'last year' (so i assume you mean Neo 0.8 or so) then things have improved, both with the java and the OO.o code itself.
this is not a low quality software package. does that mean it can't get better? no, it can, so can OfficeX. Neo/J however is incredible esp when you consider that the mac portion is two programmers.
Binaries for KDE on OS X.