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Aqua OpenOffice.org v2.0 Cancelled
Ant writes "According to MacSlash's story, a recent post on OpenOffice.org said no Mac OS X work has been done since 2003 and that there are no longer any plans for an Aqua version 'due to various licensing, political, and fundamental engineering difficulties'. :("
FTA as a reason not to do Quartz or Aqua "X11 Will Always Look like Other Platforms: Many people deploying OpenOffice.org count the identical look and feel on all supported platforms as a major benefit. It helps them reduce training and, in many cases, implement a single multi-platform solution using OpenOffice.org as middleware (such as extendedPDF). Any native work that changes the interface would remove this as a critical selling point for OpenOffice.org for these users."
;)
Umm, I have yet to hear one negative comment regarding Aqua interfaces (done right). This comment appears to be nothing but pure FUD. If anything, an Aqua UI would make an OOo suite EASIER to use on an OS X system.
But, again, whatever. I can't wait to get ahold of Pages. Apple seems to have finally woken up and realized they need their own (updated) office/productivity suite. OOo is great and all, but if their team seems to have the attitude "one platform, one UI" is better, I'll pass.
Besides, there's always NeoOffice/J to root for!
OOo works fine under X11, but...
- Most people don't have X11 installed - it's optional.
- It doesn't have the key combos people are used to.
- It may never be made to *look* native if it remains X11-only.
- Menubar is in the "wrong" place for a Mac app.
- It doesn't have a standard Dock icon of its own.
Those are the primary issues, and none of them are necessarily deal-breakers for you or me. But they they severely hamper usability for inexperienced users who don't know what X11 is and won't understand why the app looks and behaves the way it does.
Yes, it is ugly. It integrates very badly into the rest of the system (e.g. you can't alt-tab to it properly). Copy-Paste doesn't work between other apps well. The whole UI feels like a unix application.
I guess it would be like running a windows app on linux and having the whole thing feel like a windows app. Sure, it runs and it is better than nothing, but compared to a true linux app it is awful.
A native (carbonised) OOo would be suitable for giving to people running OSX that ask for a word processor. An X11 OOo is suitable for linux users who also have a mac.
Looks like the NeoOffice guys got off their butts and decided to do it rather than stay put and wait for others to do it for them... Nice one guys... More power to your fingers. The others who were expecting it to be done for them by the OOo team should hang their heads in shame... First rule of Opensource... if you want it, then get on and do it... otherwise you could find yourself waiting forever...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
First of all, this is NOT related to Apple announcing iWork. At all. No, there's no conspiracy.
Second, this is OLD news. Anyone who's even remotely followed OpenOffice.org Mac OS X porting work knew any potential Aqua port was on the back burner. Way on the back burner. With the stove unplugged.
Third, the X11 port will ALWAYS continue to exist.
Fourth, there is a Mac OS X graphical port, albeit via Java, in the form of NeoOffice (1, 2). This project has come a LONG way since its relatively recent inception, and is an impressive work melding OpenOffice with the Mac OS X look and feel. There's more work to be done, but the latest 1.1 development release is impressive.
Fifth, there are gargantuan technical hurdles to maintaining a full Aqua port of OpenOffice without greater engineering support (perhaps from the likes of Sun, who has shown zero interest in maintaining OpenOffice for Mac OS X, much less maintaining a commercial StarOffice for Mac OS X). These are all detailed here, incidentally by one of NeoOffice's chief representatives.
So calm down. This isn't an Apple conspiracy, or the end of OpenOffice for Mac OS X. OpenOffice will continue, in X11 form AND in the likes of things such as NeoOffice. If anyone is to blame for the official OpenOffice.org Aqua port going by the wayside, frankly, it's a lot closer to Sun than anyone else.
If you are talking about "functionally", things like a working clipboard are essential. Especially for Mac users which historically have had nearly no integration problems (drag-n-drop and rich clipboard always Just Worked unless you still X11 into the mix)
You can't ignore the largest Unix vendor in the world: Apple. You're just cutting your own throat if you ignore a huge segment of the market for your software. Projects succeed when people USE the software.
That's why. It's not native to Aqua and it shows. Mac people like polished apps, and Qt apps simply look like they've been poorly ported from Windows.
Yeah but openoffice on X11 basically sucks for an OSX desktop user familiar with the Macintosh interface.
On a 1.2 GHz G4 with plenty of RAM, it's noticeably slower to start than any other app, including the dominant commercial office suite, and things like cutting and pasting between applications don't work. Add to that, unfamiliarity of the interface and poor interoperability with the file formats your clients and partners are using (can you say microsoft monopoly?) and it's not worth the trouble.
Unfortunate, because, like it or not, OSX is a significant unix desktop userbase. I tried and failed to migrate a mac-centric client to open office, so I know from experience that users mostly just want to meet their deadlines. They don't care what the boss is spending for software, they don't care about vendor lockin, they don't care about philosophy, they don't even care much about stability. They care about ease-of-use (usually meaning familiarity) and interoperability.
i've been a Linux user for about 10 years and a Mac user for about 2. when i went to install OpenOffice on my ibook i had to jump through hoops i hope to never have to jump through again.
So bad where these hoops that i've pretty much tossed OO (using X11) and am using NeoOfficeJ with fairly good success.
If the OO team wants Mac users to migrate from MS Office to OO it would probably be smart to focus some time and energy on a native port. Very few people are willing to take all the necessary steps to get OO running on OS X with X11. not only that but it's slow, doesn't have nearly as nice an interface, and DRINKS DOWN the memory.
nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
Ask Microsoft how well Word would be accepted if it didn't follow the basic UI outlines of the Mac OS. There used to be a time when Word (and all Microsoft products) made up their own key combos, their own look and feel and were generally willy nilly -- a lot like many X11 offerings now. Word was the same on Windows (albeit 3.11) and Mac (6 or 7) but it didn't play well with the other programs.
As a tech support, do you think you'd get more questions from people about why copy and paste doesn't use the same buttons on the Mac/PC/Linux versions or do you think users are more likely to not understand this one program that doesn't act anything like the other Mac programs? How many users are going to hop from machine to machine versus program to program? And then consider that it is just a word processor. Screw it. I wouldn't want those support calls.
This has been the downfall of many otherwise fine pieces of software on the Mac OS. It's users expect consistancy.
They wouldn't be able to do it right anyway. Seriously, a lot of people are under the misconception that Aqua is a set of nifty-looking widgets. It's an interface standard for clean apps.
If your app has some shitty Office-like toolbar consisting of a row of 20 NSButtons, that's a shitty design. If your app's preferences are organized into 3 rows of 10 tabs each, that's a shitty design. If you can find the same function in 4 different places, that's a shitty design. Doesn't matter if it has an Aqua titlebar and Aqua buttons. Look to Office 2004 as an example of how Aqua cannot save fundamentally bad UI design. The OO.org guys would've just made the same mistake.
I know of one potentially big one, and that is platform independance.
This may not be big on your list of needs if you're just running OS X at home, but in an enterprise setting where they've standardized on one office suite, but permit different OS's for different purposes, having one suite that can be run on all of them is important.
Or what if you suddenly need to change OS or hardware platforms? It's generally nice to be able to be able to use the same applications, even on a different environment. I know this is why I have Firefox installed on all of my systems, be they Linux, Mac OS X, OS/2, or Windows.
OOo could be a big deal on OS X if it were available in a pure Aqua version (NeoOffice/J notwithstanding). But it isn't, and now it looks like it won't be anytime in the near future.
Yaz.
I really dont see what the problem is with using the X11 version of OpenOffice on Mac OS X. Maintaining a seperate version of Open Office for another proprietary API would have consumed more precious developer resources which could instead be used to add new features to Open Office rather than endlessly reinventing the wheel to port old features to a million different OS dependant APIs. X11 is the most widely avialable GUI system and is available on most OSs, and works perfectly fine.
Some have said that the X11 version is "ugly", but the Open Office developers have only themselves to blame for that, there are numerous beautiful graphics toolkits avialable on X11 which wonderful and georgeous user interfaces can be created with. Its not like X11 actually restricts user interface design, in fact, X11 provides a stable, time tested and refined platform which doesnt limit the beautiful user interfaces that you can implement on top of it.
As far as performance, I get excellant performance from X11 on my systems, ussually better than Windows on the same hardware. X11 itself actually does not consume much memory or resources at all on your system. The X Server core consumes under 3 MB (this is around the executable size of the Xnest server which includes just the Xserver core, no hardware drivers).
In fact, It wouldnt bother me at all if Open Office was run on Windows using the cygwin X11 servers rather than have a native windows port. And, i do use Windows and Cygwin all the time, I would much rather see developer resources go to adding new features to one X11 open API based port rather than maintaining a bunch of native ports for proprietary closed OS dependant APIs like Windows and Mac. The overall result would be a much better quality product on all operating systems. Such is part of the beauty of the standardised, OS indepedant X11 API, it allows the same GUI work to be used across many platforms.
On the Mac platform, there's Microsoft Office available natively, and now Keynote and Pages. OpenOffice arguably competes with MS Office essentially only on the basis of price, not by being better. However, people who buy macs have already demonstrated a willingness to pay a premium so that things "work". Therefore, it's not worth the manpower to maintain a native port for a small percentage of a small market. I keep MS office around solely for opening other people's files, and use LaTeX, Matlab, and the Adobe products for preparing documents.
For better or worse, the success of NeoOffice/J in this regard has to be considered as a factor in the abandonment of OOo/Aqua. In other words, Neo has rendered a native Aqua port unnecessary. That's really what the OOo folks are saying.
Any Mac user who considers the OSX11 version ugly and hard to install (and it is) should download the current Neo 1.1beta and give it a look. It's easy to install, and while still not as pretty as one expects to find in a Mac app, it integrates well enough into the OS X environment (e.g. native pull-down menu, keyboard shortcuts, printing, fonts) that it could "pass" as a native app. It's no Office X, but it's good enough to give to Regular People as a free substitute. I think the only thing it's missing that it really needs is a "look and feel" theme that mimics Aqua instead of MacOS 9, and (like all versions of OOo) more speed.
So now we have two clear choices:
If consistency with the current Win and Lin versions is important to you, use the OSX11 version.
If consistency with other OSX apps and ease of installation is important to you, use NeoOffice/J.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
First, this isn't a surprise. They announced a while back that they might not even have an X11 port of OOo version 2 for OS X. While it is kinda crappy that they are completely abandoning it, there isn't much they can do if they don't have the developers.
As for their reasoning that an X11 port is better, it is completely flawed. Firefox shows that reason 1 and 2 are bogus as it is to market at the same time on all platforms with equal stability, reason 3 is actually a draw-back that they are trying to market as a feature (gotta love the Microsoft-ian logic there), and the last one is basically a way of stating that we already have an X11 port so it means less work for us. If any of these were valid points, Windows users would be running it in Cygwin right now. They're all just a way of saying "we don't care in the slightest about your platform, but we don't want to look like we don't care." Frankly, if you don't care, that's cool. This is your work. You don't have to support Mac OS X if you don't want to. Anyone is free to come along and pick it up if they are interested. That's what is so great about free software. Just don't trip me and tell me you did it because I looked lonely and you thought I could use a hug from the ground.
More importantly, OOo just isn't that good. It's amazingly slow and ugly, uses a fileformat that takes forever to save and creates huge files, and just plain worse than the other options out there. It's why there haven't been a lot of developers flocking to it from the Mac community. Something like Adium gets developers because it is the best. It's fully native, it's fast and clean, etc. There are a lot of other OSS projects on the Mac as well that are all good projects. OOo, by comparison, seems to employ a pretty terrible codebase and interface. While it has more features than AbiWord, AbiWord is clearly a better base. When you add Mac uses tendency toward well-done software with the fact that Mac users also don't mind paying for software as much as users of other platforms (lets face it, even Windows users don't pay for software - they pirate it), it means that OOo on the Mac doesn't have as much interest.
One of the big problems is that OOo only has the "free" aspect to draw users. WordPerfect Suite and Microsoft Office are still much, much better applications - this is coming from a user whose computer only has Ubuntu on it, not some OSS hater.
I've come down pretty hard on OOo here, but as a long term Mac user and now an Ubuntu user who loves Gnome, OOo is just terrible. Now, if you want the most featured office suite available, OOo is a great option for you. For a user like myself, and most Mac users, the features of OOo don't make up for the bloat and interface. Things like AbiWord and Apple's new Pages are much more attractive options even though they do less. Hopefully, OOo will become better in the future (I've run some of the 2.0 previews and wasn't that happy). Maybe AbiWord and OOo will start to converge toward each other like mySQL and PostgreSQL. But until OOo cleans itself up a lot, there isn't going to be the interest needed to bring it to the Macintosh because of how Mac users like their applications to work.
You should read Apple Human Interface Guidelines. For your reference, toolbars DO NOT look like this in Cocoa. Also, UI elements are not placed at random within Aqua. Apple Interface builder shows dynamic guides when you place controls, and these guides help you to comform to HIG. Items should be aligned. Push buttons should have descriptive text on them, there should be sufficient spacing between UI elements.
Merely using Aqua controls is not enough.
I disagree with the hypothesis that "No-one likes Office". I can agree that most people here on /. (myself included) don't like Office, but we're in a minority situation.
I imagine there are lots of people in clerical professions who have gone on two-day courses to get a certificate saying they know how to use Office who rather like it, because they're experts in it. Much like there are people out there who really like Windows because they make a lot of money working in it (regardless of how truly crappy it is).
I can understand why OOo is targeting the Office crowd -- they don't need to target those people who have a need for a word processor every third Sunday -- they're going after those people who are currently using MS Office day-in and day-out, and who expect a competing suite to offer similar features and a similar experience.
My copy of iWork is already on order. I've been wanting to get Keynote for some time now, and getting it bundled with what looks to be a high-quality word processing/page layout solution for less money equals me pre-ordering a copy from Apple's website the same day it was announced :).
Yaz.
Don't blame Mac users if you don't write an application to look like the platform you put it on.
You wouldn't write an Apple IIe-type program for Windows and expect people to think it looked nice.
Why would you expect to write a program for one type of GUI, port it, but keep exactly the same interface, and expect the people on the second platform to think your program works very well?
Programs on different operating systems should not look exactly the same. If you have a program for one OS that looks like it was written for a different OS, you can expect people to see that application as a half-attempt, and you can expect them not to regard the program very highly.
And as for open-source on the Mac OS, most Mac users I know love open-source software. I have nine open-source applications in my dock right now, and numerous others on my system. Most of them have been much more successful than OO.o. I would say that 99% of the problem OO.o has on the Mac is that it doesn't look like other Mac programs and doesn't try to.
Most Mac users don't want to run second-hand programs, and second-hand is exactly the impression OO.o leaves on the Mac.
I was really looking forward to an Aqua port of OO.o.
Albuquerque PC
I'm sure a million other osx folks will flame about this, but it's really difficult to use X11 when you're used to the consistency of native OSX (Cocoa or Carbon to a certain extent) applications. i.e.: All OSX apps have similar places to go for preferences, to open/save files, edit, help, etc. Plus keybindings and mouse behavior are all similar. Compared to that, running an X11 application is like being thrown back to 1990. Menu's are attached to the window, keybindings are messed up, and you're lucky if copy/paste works.
I don't see what the problem is with integrating native GUI libs with an OSS project. Firefox does this with extreme success on multiple platforms. This should've been OpenOffice's strategy from day 1.
_______
2B1ASK1
Nobody really cares what goes on underneath the hood. The real issues are 1) ease of installation on an unmodified OS 2) aesthetic quality and performance of GUI. If you can get both of these with some embedded implementation of X11 based on the Cygwin stuff, then more power to you. But don't expect anybody to take an office suite seriously that requires you to install a complete windowing system on top of your native OS just to make it work. Installing Cygwin isn't terribly hard or anything, but unless the whole process is completely seamless from a user perspective, people just won't do it. And companies will drop it like a hot potato.
So in short, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with using the X11 version of OOo on Mac OS X, except that it doesn't mesh with the native look and feel, subjectively feels slower than any native Aqua app does, and requires (or at least it used to - it may be integrated into the install process now, haven't checked the OS X builds in ages) separate installation of an X11 server before it will work. These are all completely unacceptable in a mass market office suite.
They'd do good to do a port to the gecko engine used by Firefox and other Mozilla apps. That way the two projects could share resources for making the apps friendly for a wide-selection of platforms.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I can't say this without being a huge asshole but i'll try.
If the mac users are really that picky about the UI why don't they pay for the development of a mac version of OO or lobby apple for a real office suite or just say fuck it and buy msoffice?
If not openoffice then maybe koffice or abiword/gnumeric or something.
It just strikes me as being totally arrogant to say "what you gave me for free isn't good enough for me, go back make it so that I am happy and don't expect me to lift a finger or spend a dime either."
Maybe it's time to scratch off the mac as a supported platform for OO.
evil is as evil does
"These are all completely unacceptable in a mass market office suite."
I think this is exactly why OO will never be ported to macosx. The developers know that the mac crowd will not accept OO unless it's better then MS office. The windows and linux oo users are more tolerant and flexible in their expectations. They are willing to use something for free even if it does not work as well as something that costs 400 dollars. Mac users would rather pay the 400 dollars then to use anything that would spoil their mac experience.
I think this is a good decision by the OO guys. It would be really hard to support or live up to the expectations of the typical mac user. It would be a thankless job and it would be very painful.
evil is as evil does
>I really dont see what the problem is with using the X11 version of OpenOffice on Mac OS X.
You probably haven't used the Mac much. Probably the BEST thing about the Mac is the consistency of the UI (enforced by published Human Interface Guidelines) - this has been an advantage since the original 128K machine.
OO.o on OS X stinks- the menus are attached to windows instead of the standard Mac menu bar, Mac fonts aren't available, dialogs don't match the Aqua standard, aliases aren't supported in File Open/Save dialogs, cut and paste are broken, there is no QuickTime or iPhoto or Services or Dock or Keychain or AppleScript support, and the damn thing is S-L-O-W.
For users who came over from Windows/Linux (i.e. the ones who bitch the most about well-established Mac UI conventions) OO.o might be acceptable. For anyone who is used to the Mac's capabilities, it's a POS.
There's a profound lesson which many a developer from Apple and Microsoft on down has discovered vis the Mac market- crap won't fly. Period. Crippling your app so it is limited to "common denominator" features found on other platforms is a sure path to failure.
If the OO.o developers had REALLY been interested in the Mac, they would have supported the above Mac technologies plus new stuff like Spotlight and Automator. This announcement is no real shock nor is it much of a loss for the platform.
"Without a Macintosh version using Macintosh interface conventions, Open Office will never be able to replace MS Office in the corporate world."
That's just pure bullshit. OO will do just fine in the corporate market without mac support. Mac support never has been and never will be an obstacle. Like you said it's like 1% of the corporate desktops.
evil is as evil does
That's not what they're saying at all. What they are saying is "If you want us to use what you make, make something we would want to use."
Most Mac users do exactly as you suggest, which is use MS Office or some other native Mac alternative.
Saying "I'm giving you this for free, so you better use it even though it doesn't suit your needs." is just as arrogant.
And I say this as someone who is perfectly happy running the X11 version of OO.o on my Macs.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
I remeber back when people still bought their office apps separately and Excel was the superior thing.
It was then that microsoft started pushing the office concept with the pricing where you could get the whole office package for about one and half times the excel price, thus people started going for it, though usually word was seen as not so good solution, but a "good enough" one.
So, what are these powerful features I'm talking about?
- AppleScript. Do all YOUR [assume you're a Linux user for a minute, please] graphical applications support scripting -- and more importantly, cross-application scripting? Mine do! And I can mix Applescript and Bash script in the same file.
- Services. I can select text in any application and have it spell-checked, read to me, inserted into an email, auto-summarized, etc. I can even apply an Applescript to it.
- The Terminal. I get a pretty GUI, but I get all the UNIXy commmand-line goodness, too.
- Mac apps. I can run *nix and X11 apps just like you can, but I can run Mac apps too, and you can't. There are lots of Mac apps with no real (decent and complete) equivalent on Linux: iTunes, Keynote, commercial games, that bookshelf thingy that there was an article about yesterday, etc. And they've got the je ne sais quoi too. ; )
Oh, and in a few months when Tiger comes out we'll get two biggies:- Spotlight. Not only does it search, but it enables Smart Folders -- now I can set it up so that all my data gets organizes itself, instead of me having to do it manually!
- Automator. I'll be able to create scripts graphically (no worrying about syntax and no having to look up the API).
If all you Linux or Windows people see when you look at OS X is the eye candy, you're missing the point."[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Apple should do a Safari (Darwin, Cups, GCC...) here and admit that they can't produce a first rate office suite by themselves.
I strongly disagree. For quite some time I hoped that Apple would pick up the Mozilla source and run with it. Instead they picked up the Konquerer source and ran with it. It was probably a good engineering decision on their part and it resulted in corporate sponsorship for a second open source rendering engine. This helps open standards and keeps web developers from writing gecko specific code to go with their IE specific code.
I've used open office, and a huge number of other word processors, and layout programs. There is huge room for improvement over either OpenOffice or Word. I'd like to see some of the best features of Word, OpenOffice, Indesign, and Framemaker all put together with some top notch usability. I don't think Pages will be there in it's first iteration, and maybe never. But from what I have seeing it may be a better, and more flexible base than OpenOffice would have been. That is not to say that I don't think support for open formats is not important. They have a good start on compatibility but seem to be lacking support for OpenOffice, Latex, PNG, SVG, and a few others. Also, I hope their native format is XML based, like Keynote. Ideally, they will have a plug-in format so any developers can easily incorporate import/export filters to a given format.
Basically what I am saying is that while I appreciate OpenOffice, I'd much rather see a system designed right from the ground up, rather than another Word clone, regardless of the quality.