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'. :("

Comments

What's the downside to using X11?

[Eric Smith]

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?

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[Goalie_Ca]

As a linux user before i got my mac i was wondering the same damn thing... but then i got my mac. First of all, the X11 applications don't conform to apple's UI guidelines. It just doesn't fit in at all. It's goofy and awkward. Secondly, you gotta load up an x11 environment and then the application. You thought it took long enough to load up already? Luckily X11 doesn't take up too much memory though x11 applications feel less responsive for stuff like menu systems. It draws really fast, but doesn't respond too quickly.

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[pixelgeek]

-- The only way OpenOffice can take on Microsoft is to not only build a better office suite

Actually I think that path will fail miserably. The path to take is the one I think that Apple is taking. Make sucecssful and compelling apps that provide people with the features they want and make them easy to use and interoperable.

Office apps are typically bloated and infuriating to use. The main reason I don't use OO on any platform is that it tries to mimic the same horrible user experience that Office has.

Why duplicate crappy applications? People aren't that stupid and if you give them useful, functional applications that still do things like read Office files then I am sure they will use them.

No-one likes Office so what is there to lose in trying to duplicate Office formats but with a better app?

I'll be checking out Pages when it comes out but if Keynote is any indication I am sure it will be yet one more reason not to use Office or OO

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[mattkinabrewmindspri]

I can't convey this easily without sounding like a huge asshole, but I'll try.

Mac people don't want what open-source people think is a good interface. They want consistency and an easy learning curve. This means having all of your programs look and act basically the same. Menus, widgets, the whole shebang. X11 programs on the Mac feel very foreign and difficult by comparison, like they don't belong. Sure, they run just as well as they do on other operating systems, but they are missing a certain je ne sais quoi, which even the best X11 program is not going to have.

An aqua port of OO.o would be very worthwhile. In fact, I think it could be *huge*. Mac users are some of the most anti-Microsoft people around, and don't want to shell out money for Microsoft Office. Having a good open-source office program like OO.o on the Mac would be good for Mac users, OO.o users, and anyone who isn't a fan of Microsoft.

Qt version

[rxmd]

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.

AbiWord's new port

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

no big loss

[dankelley]

Even if there were an OO port to the standard OSX gui, would it matter?

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 :-(

Re:Too bad.

[lrucker]

Unless an experienced somebody or, more likely, team of sombodies is willing to put their nose to the project 40 hours a week, like it's a full time job, it's not going to happen

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)

Reality bites

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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. [...]

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.

More of a problem for Apple than for me

[Nice2Cats]

I use OOo with Apple's X11 and right off the bat I have to confirm what other people have said here: It works (except that you don't get italics on some fonts), but it is slow, poorly integrated and looks like crap once you are used to Aqua. You don't notice this that much with KDE/Linux or Win XP (the other two systems in our house) because their icon sets are cruder than Aqua anyway, but it is really glaring with OS X.

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.