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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!
We've had our eye on you for some time now. It seems that you've been living two lives. In one life, you're OpenOffice, an open source multi-platform office productivity suite. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias NeoOffice/J that has been engineered to run natively on Mac OS X. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not.
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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
We're not a non-profit but we're also not a commercial entity either. We're a group of volunteers who are doing this and hosting the project. For two years we didn't have any type of donate page or the like and just encouraged people to contribute by answering questions in forums, testing, or developing. Funny enough, there are still people who don't want to contribute in those ways. This started a fairly vigorous discussion as to whether we should give those people another vehicle for helping out. You can check out the user community debate back in November as to how things wound up the way they are now and where they will hopefully be going.
;)
:(
To organize as a non-profit in the state of California requires filing paperwork, meeting minimum tax requirements, and other state and federal requirements. We're not expecting to see a lot of monetary donations, so instead of shelling out all that capital to set up a new corporate entity and lose money we don't have (!) we just reused one of the S-corps we already had set up.
We couldn't just take money directly as that opens us up to personal legal liability, a bad thing for us Americans with our predatory legal system. We also can't afford to do it personally due to tax reasons. Right now we're only hoping to get enough to pay for bandwidth and hosting costs. If people actually do start donating enough though we've already decided we'll go through all the hassle of setting up a non-profit entity. It's unfortunately not worth that much hassle for just a few hundred dollars in donations
Still, I'd rather encourage people to donate time, support, and hopefully code instead. It's much more useful then money. Unfortunately time and code are more then most people are able or willing to give
ed
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
The standard GUI API for POSIX-type systems is X11. You can get X11 for OS X (since 10.3 it's been bundled with it, before that it was available from a variety of sources), and OpenOffice.org will run natively on the Mac with X11.
OpenOffice.org was originally StarOffice, and written at a time when the only systems running what today is the Mac GUI were obscure NeXT workstations that hadn't been made in five years, and very small number of "whitebox" systems running NEXTSTEP or OPENSTEP. Most people had pretty much written off the platform as dying, if not dead. Virtually all POSIX systems came with X11, either having that as their native GUI or as a back-up if you needed it.
Additionally, Java was an obscure in-house project at Sun designed to control washing machines in a language that owed more to mainstream programming dynamics and with more modern features than FORTH. Certainly, if you were writing a "cross platform" application, supporting X11 for POSIX systems and Win32 for Microsoft systems, seemed reasonable.
OpenOffice.org is a legacy system. It's easy to claim it should have been done in Java to begin with, but the fact is, it wasn't, it came out at around the same time as HotJava (most people's first exposure to the Java system), and it's not as if Java was "right out of the box" to begin with. Just ask Corel.
It's also easy to claim that the underlying GUI wrappers should have been more modular and better designed. That I'd agree with, but knowing the culture in the mid-nineties, it doesn't surprise me, indeed it surprises me they went to the extent that they did.
A rewrite might be in order, but bear in mind that a rewrite is just that - throwing the code away and starting afresh. There's no difference between a rewrite and an entirely new project, especially in the FOSS worlds where it's easy to grab code from other projects to do whatever it is you want done.
Right now, OpenOffice.org is probably the most full featured office suite available in the FOSS worlds. It needs some work to make it also the most comfortable platform, but the solution may lie in others.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Not to downplay the great achievement of Mac-ifying OOO, it is by far the best MS Office alternative for OS X yet. The only thing that keeps me from deleting the only remaining MS software on my HD is that my work (a publishing house) actually requires me to open and save in MS Word 5.1 for Macintosh format. Am I the only one who misses this? Has that format been reverse-engineered yet?
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
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
I've been using the X11 port for a long time now, and I was hoping Neo/J would offer some performance boost over the sluggish OOo/X11 system. While the interface is snappy and responsive, the program consumes a ridiculous amount of system resources. Over 100 MB of my physical memory? And I thought the kernel was a memory hog.
I like the fact that I can use the Apple command key instead of ctrl, but unless the devs are willing to give me a free 512 MB or Gig DIMM, I think I'll wait for something with a smaller memory footprint.
Glog!
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.
FWIW, one of the primary reasons that neither OOo, NeoOffice/J, nor AbiWord have grammar checkers is that no good open source grammar checker tools exist yet. Just about any grammar checker worth its salt is completely closed source. There are some options available, though...
The Link Grammar Parser is one that I've actually been keen on integrating with NeoOffice/J for quite some time. I have ideas on how to do so but have not yet had time to devote to it. I had been waiting for an OSS license for a couple of years for it, but unfortunately I think their new license was incompatible with GPL and can't be used in OOo or NeoOffice/J. Aside from that parser, I don't really know of any other good OSS grammar projects for English, much less all the foreign languages that need to be supported too!
If you have knowledge of any other OSS grammar engines (or contacts for acquiring and freeing source code for a defunct grammar checker like Correct Grammar please contact me!
ed