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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'. :("
Forgive my ignorance, but doesn't OS X include an X11 server? Is there any major drawback to running OpenOffice as an X11 application rather than a native one?
I second this, this is the project to watch for OpenOffice on MacOS. Everyone should donate to this project, they are really getting work done.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
With Apple now getting into the office suite arena, I'm far more inclined to buy it then get the free Open Office anyways.
Yes, I'm willing to pay for superior alternatives.
It's possible to compile OpenOffice using Qt for the interface (e.g. in OpenOffice/KDE). Since Qt is available with an Aqua frontend, why not use that?
It wouldn't provide overly tight integration with the MacOS X user interface, but it would be way better than today's X11-based OpenOffice.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
One more point to bring up when people ask my why on earth I'm running linux on my ibook. :-D
Seriously, that's bad. I knew that there weren't many people involved in porting it and I expected it to take longer than planed, but I never imagined it would simply be canceled.
Does somebody know what those political and licensing issues were in particultar?
This makes AbiWord's introduction of a Cocoa port even more newsworthy, in my opinion. Yes, I know it's not as robust an offering (I'm not sure how it could be with drastically different methods of development), but being able to read documents across the three major platforms in the same native format is a huge plus for me. YMMV, though.
The x11 port works as well as it does on other platforms, i.e. it's great unless you want ms-office compatibilityl. The OSX port would add eye candy and a more conventional OSX "feel." I suppose it would also support fonts (which mac users have in massive numbers). But would these things be enough to make users switch? I think not.
Folks who want full ms-office compatibility will use ms-office or, perhaps, the upcoming iWork. nd folks who can live with something that is not ms-office compatible (and I stipulate that OO is not) will probably be just as happy to use the existing x11 interface.
Me? For committee work (which demands ms-office compatibility), I'll use ms-office. For presentations I'll use keynote, unless I'm sharing it and therefore using PowerPoint. For my research writing I'll use latex. For my friends I'll use a fountain pen. Hm... OO doesn't fit in anywhere :-(
NeoOffice/J, the current version, is Java based (from the wiki. I'd like to see a version of OpenOffice using native Aqua and Quartz.
I haven't tried out neoffice but I must admit MS office for mac is damn impressive. When MS is forced to omit OS-level integration and install only 4 apps, none of that other crud, it works out quite nicely. In fact, the UI hit the sweet spot, it loads fast, it's very nice, and it's not bloated at all. The install is nice and snappy too because all you gotta do is copy a folder and stick the cd key in.
I still prefer to use latex for writeups but when i need to use office, MS office for Mac is pretty damn good. There is a reason why office for mac consistently gets better reviews than its windows counterpart.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Not as a rebuttal, but as an inquiry:
Is there a good compiler (open source or otherwise, but for the major platforms) that will turn Java into native code without requiring a virtual machine?
I don't see why one shouldn't exist, but I haven't heard much about one.
Also, he claims
... huh?
Large animals, such as sheep and cattle, are used to convert captured solar energy into a form that humans can use
That's what plants are for buddy.. Large animals then convert the hard earned energy of the plants into useless gasses, heat, sound and a tiny bit of food.
If you want sustainability, get rid of the big animals. In fact get rid of the chickens, too.
stuff
Has anyone tried hiring a MacOS X developer or consultant to port OO.org to MacOS X? It seems like a native OO.org isn't really desired if all people do is complain that a nativa MacOS X OO.o doesn't exist and someone else won't do the work for free. Perhaps a bunch of MacOS X users would be willing to chip in US$20 to pay for something that can get the ball rolling.
Digital Citizen
There is a certain amount of logic to the idea that they should focus on X11. But the truth is that if Apple really wanted an Aqua version, there would be one. Apple has been known to be rather snobby, and they're probably suffering a bit from the NIH complex, because they're working on their own productivity suite.
It's kinda like expecting really good support from Apple for Mozilla when they'd rather push Safari.
Well, I do understand their reasoning, and as others have pointed out, Apple will always be a "niche market" for OOo.
Of course, as a mac user I am somewhat pissed off that the platform is being relegated to the status of a second-class citizen. OSX X11 takes quite a while to start up, and incurs a NOTICABLE overhead compared to the Windows native version of OpenOffice.
Also, on a platform that makes it name based on simplicity, having to install X11, with its cumbersome (and possibly confusing to users with no *NIX familiarity) configuration choices may drive users away.
On the flip side of this coin, Apple's iWork suite may get a boost from this (OpenOffice will never be native, iWork is native & integrates seamlessly with the rest of the iEverything world), which will help Apple's bottom line - so this isn't all bad.
Still, I was hoping for a native OpenOffice in v 2.0. Cest' la vie.
/~mikeg
I personally feel that while in an ideal world Java would be good solution, I'm not convinced its the answer to all the world's software portability problems.
ANSI C is very portable. It's also utterly useless for things like GUI applications, unless you feel that writing your own GUI toolkit and low-level system interface is fun. Portability problems are introduced by the system APIs and GUI toolkits used to do interesting things - not by the language.
Java provides a standard GUI toolkit, plus some very good abstractions of platform APIs. If, however, you want to go beyond those platform APIs, you're back at square 1 - re-implementing the platform service, or writing an interface to it to abstract it for cross platform use. Bang! Your Java app just ceased to be portable.
To get the sort of OS integration the mac users rant about, I'd be very surprised if you didn't have to write a few extensions for platform API interfaces.
Another issue with Java is the GUI toolkit. IMO Swing is clunky, ugly, and gives everybody the SAME poor "user experience". Even tools like JEdit that I've seen held up as examples of how well things can work feel pretty painful in my experience when compared to a native app. I'd find Java a lot more interesting if Sun would bite the bullet and put their weight behind SWT.
In the mean time, I'll be sticking to C++ and Qt - IMO the next best thing for portability, and much better when it comes to GUI work. Of course, Qt borrows liberally from the Java APIs where they're good, and I'll for that.
As for Mozilla, I'm pretty sure they implement their own GUI toolkit - not a window system. I'm with you on the slow RAM hog, though.
I'm not one to argue that Java is fast, but IMO until they Sun addresses the Swing albatross Java won't be a viable first choice for implementing serious GUI applications where "user experience" is a major concern.
It could be one somebody, but yeah, it's a full-time job - I wrote the original Swing MacLookAndFeel from Apple and if I hadn't started when Swing first came out, long before anyone else thought it was important, it wouldn't have been ready when OS X shipped.
(This was the second MacL&F, actually, but the first one was really only a "look". I had nothing to do with it)
That's just a lame excuse for "We are the mighty Sun, but we don't help those Mac faggots, because Apple is now competing with us in servers. We neither helped those OS/2 idiots when we released the StarOffice 5.2 source. We had the OS/2 sources of StarOffice 5.1, but OS/2 is from IBM and they are competing with us either. We didn't want to release the source of Win32 StarOffice, too, but Windows is too big to ignore."
Yeah, it couldn't possibly be that porting from X11 on Linux/Solaris to X11 on Mac is much much easier than actually creating an Aqua port.
Well, yes they can ignore Apple, what has anybody in the OSS world got to lose by 'ignoring Apple'?
Revenue? nope.
Respect? not from tards like you, I guess
If Apple doesn't want to support X11 properly, with a decent font server and a lack of high-performance extensions, thats their call.
So tell me again what the motivation for volunteers to port to OS X native APIs (which are mostly closed and proprietary) are?
Come on, You have a native MS Office port for your platform, a bunch of other shareware or commercial office suites and surprising as it may be for you, Linux/UNIX users are not all primarily motivated by this ridiculous 'BEAT MICROSOFT AT ALL COSTS' idea.
Just pay for an office suite if you need one that fits criteria that the open alternatives don't meet.
Thats the economic model that Apple's Carbon and Cocoa APIs encourage, so if you want to have a go at someone over it, take it up with Steve Jobs, not the people in the OSS community.
Nobody owes it to you to slave away cutting code for an essentially closed platform that few developers have on their desktops, so you can type out your word processing documents. If it means so much to you, either do it yourself or organise a bunch of people to do it for you.
Its not going to happen just because you post your whinings to Slashdot, thats for sure.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I always look at these threads with amazement. How can anyone really believe that a major corporation supports OSS for philosophical reasons? They do it because of basic economics, which they expect to benefit them in the long run. Typically, they are attempting to commoditize software on a particular hardware or OS platform they control, in order to increase the value of their position in that hardware/OS market, or more likely today in related service sectors. It is not surprising at all that Sun won't divert resources to support OSS on a competing platform!
It's also amazing that a few OSS evangelists can still chant the "if you don't like the development direction, you can just fork" mantra and maintain that OSS is future-proof and highly portable on this sort of basis. To an impartial observer, it's obvious that most of the major OSS projects (from Linux on down) are developed principally by a small number of commercial concerns, who have those same reasonable economic drivers for doing it. Unfortunately, it just isn't realistic for a handful of individuals who haven't been involved for a long time to pick up projects on this scale and carry on development. It has never been a good situation in the commercial, closed source world, and just opening the source to everyone (typically laughable documentation and testing included if you're lucky) doesn't make it any more likely that it will happen. Sun apparently understands this, and knows that in reality they still have far more control over StarOffice/OpenOffice development than anyone else, and will therefore use it to their advantage if they're even remotely smart.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
The success of iTunes for Windows suggests that this is not universally true. I know some people who avoid it because the interface is weird compared to what they're used to, but there are plenty of people who really don't seem to have any problem running something that looks like a Mac app on their PC.
But it works, and since we got so fed up with different file formats at home and switched everything to the free OpenOffice XML (OASIS) format, this is what counts here. Those of you who think OpenOffice XML is some isolated open source thing should keep in mind that the European Union (400 million people and counting) is probably going to make OASIS an ISO standard (Sun is pushing this like mad), and that open source projects of all kinds are converging on it as a common standard: Koffice is the biggy next to OpenOffice.org. The standard is here to stay. If you want to play the game, sooner or later you either have to have a monopoly or support it.
Which brings us to the reason why this new announcement is more of a problem for Apple than for the average Slashdot user: The OS X platform does not offer a free full-fledged office suite. AppleWorks is a joke, basically one of those toy apps left over from when they had that toy operating system OS 9, and iWorks is neither a full suite nor does it support OASIS. And there is no way I am going to pay for Microsoft Office, since it does little more than OpenOffice for some ridiculous price. I mean, when it comes down to it we're talking about the choice between buying an iPod or buying Microsoft Office. Duh!
I've said this before and I'll say it again: Apple should do a Safari (Darwin, Cups, GCC...) here and admit that they can't produce a first rate office suite by themselves. Keep Keynote if you must, but get the rest of the people wasting their time with iWorks behind an Aqua OpenOffice port. This would rid Apple of the last area where they are dependent on Microsoft, and give them the office capabilities the Mac currently lacks.
I first tried NeoOffice/J a year or so ago. It was huge, took forever to boot, and ran dog slow. I wondered: why on earth would anyone rewrite a beast like OO.org in Java?? Didn't realize the Java part was a lightweight wrapper around the OO core.
Anyway, I went back to using OO.org X11. It's huge, and runs pretty slow, and looks like crap, but it works. The Start OO.org AppleScript launcher, which provides an icon to start OO.org, and also provides support for OO filetypes with icons, is a nice supplement.
After seeing this today, I tried the current version of NeoOffice/J. I didn't realize it was this far along. A real Mac menubar! Aqua print dialogs! Starts up reasonably fast! No X11 required! Compared to OO.org X11, this is already a native port. Yes, it has a little further to go, but my gosh, what a good job for a project with two or three developers.
Great job, guys!