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At Long Last, NeoOffice/J 1.1 Released
VValdo writes "After nearly five years of development, NeoOffice/J has made it to its first stable release. NeoOffice/J 1.1 is a Mac OS X-integrated office suite based on OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 that includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing applications. Key Macintosh features include a standard Mac OS X installer, a native Aqua menu bar, use of the native printing system, full clipboard support, drag-and-drop, Mac "command" key shortcuts, mouse scrolling, integration with major Mac email clients and native support for Mac fonts. The full announcement is here."
Apple go and change the architecture they're running on :D
At least mirrordot was able to save a cache:
f 78 9b6ec7a2075940c/index.html
http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/56f602610d944f
Looks like their news page died at 17,000 hits after 12:17 today. Very sad.
LainTheWired = isgod( int Lain, int denial, float truth)
The NeoOffice/J 1.1 release is now available for download. Warning: all NeoOffice/J development and testing is done by volunteers so there are always some missing features and bugs. So if you expect software to be absolutely perfect before you install it, we recommend that you purchase a commercially supported office suite like Microsoft Office. (emphasis mine)
Hrm - maybe Office on the Mac is much better than the Windows version. I've been hearing that for awhile, but it's still from Microsoft, and will still have some of the same issues that people have on the Windows version, or it'd have compatibility problems (key commands, etc).
Still, I thought that comment about something being 'absolutely perfect' then recommending Office was pretty funny.
creation science book
J stands for Java.
I'll keep my client running today. Will you? http://play.aelitis.com/torrents/NeoOfficeJ-1.1.dm g.torrent
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My sister needs a laptop for work and I have been steering her towards a G4 mac. MS office adds $AUD300 to the price, which offends me, mainly because of the huge profit microsoft make out of it.
Having this available could make it a much easier decision for her to buy the macintosh.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Looking at the integration features, it seems better then either Windows or *nix versions of OpenOffice.
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
I have begun to think that most, if not all, free software applications ought to be written in Java or a reasonable facsimile. Ideally, a common language and runtime that all free software could target would be available that would allow immediate porting to take place.
To some extent we have this now with Linux as a standard OS, but even with it there is a lack of common binary compatibility. Java takes care of that such that the same binary application on one platform works on another, only relying on the base runtime to be ported.
How much quicker could we have had NeoOffice on MacOS if it were written in an easily-ported language like Java?
Are there any plans for such a common language runtime to which applications can target themselves in the free software ecosystem?
Before anyone complains about the lack of Aqua widgets and the continuing Windows 95-like appearance of the program, from experience that's probably the last remaining area to be completed.
Everything else is great, and infinitely superior to the old port of OpenOffice.org to the Mac's X11 - for instance, copy-and-paste works fully (styled text is no problem whatsoever); file associations work correctly; native printing, fonts, anti-aliased line art are just fine. Even more recent, esoteric stuff like Spotlight searches are fine - when I installed Tiger, all my documents got neatly indexed without me lifting a finger.
It's in an application bundle, it stores its settings in ~/Library/ - apart from those grey, rectangular buttons and controls, it's a complete, modern Mac application.
Honestly, don't judge it on first appearances or screenshots (I've found numerous Mac 'ports' of software which seem to concentrate too much on cosmetics rather than functionality) - it's truly wonderful. For anyone looking for a free office suite on their Mac, here it is!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
In terms of competition, there's KOffice for MacOS X I kept my eyes on, see http://kde.opendarwin.org/. Still pre-alpha however.
I use and love iWorks. Keynote is simply *great*. But it is not free (forget open source). And iWorks, for the moment, lacks a spreedsheet, which OOO doesn't. Thanks to OOO and NeoOfficeJ developpers! :-)
Animoog.org
Actually most of it's written in C++ (IIRC, the FAQs are down), same as OpenOffice.org. Only the OS X specific bit's in Java.
It's the next version up from Apple's iVersion.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
Here's the Coralized link:
e x.php/NeoOffice/J_1.1_Announcement#Announcement_.5 Ben.5D
http://neowiki.sixthcrusade.com.nyud.net:8090/ind
Though, frankly, there's not much there to read.
Greg
NeoOffice isn't the one.
and that quite possibly
there is no server.
Hrm - maybe Office on the Mac is much better than the Windows version. I've been hearing that for awhile, but it's still from Microsoft,
It's far from perfect on the Mac, but I'm always astounded at how much it is better on the Mac than on Windows.
So, once upon a time there was a NeoOffice/C which used the C bindings, but for some reason it was very difficult to develop. The authors then abandoned it and used the Java bindings instead, producing NeoOffice/J. This was only feasible because OpenOffice makes heavy use of Java internally.
(One minor point of confusion for me: The NeoOffice FAQ claims that NeoOffice/C used the Cocoa API, but I thought that was only for Objective C and Java. I thought for pure C you had to go with the Carbon API.)
fonts on Linux are a bit "blurry"...that is, they are not as clear/crisp as their those on their windows counterparts.
According to this it's a patent issue. I think there's something deeply wrong with patents on operations required to render fonts correctly, above and beyond the already troubling issue of software patents in general. Remember that in the US fonts are explicitly not copyrightable to prevent even the potential of copyright being used to prevent free speech. Shouldn't this easement be extended to any communication or presentation technology.
This 800x600 screenshot should survive a slashdot throttling.
I can't check the wiki since it has been slashdotted, does anyonw know how much Java is in NeoOffice?
A LOT. NeoOffice/J more or less uses the core of OOo for opening/saving files, and rendering the GUI to a back-buffer. Everything else, such as the screen handling, clipboard, I/O, and anything else machine specific, is done through Java.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Mac People
UI standards aside, it's interesting to note that this phrase "Mac People" now also means "BSD-UNIX users of Intel-based computers... ~with~ two-button mice."
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Just as with C++, regular C code can be used in an Objective C program, but still be treated the same, so you can us C with Cocoa.
OpenOffice on OSX was almost cancelled several times due to the amount of x86-specific code in it, apparently.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
... And thus easy to make a universal binary from? Or will this be harder to port once the Intel switch begins?
Good app, but I hope it can move with the Mac as Apple transitions to Intel processors. Seems like kind of a waste of effort if it's tied to a specific architecture, in light of Apples recent announcements.
Microsoft Office for Mac OS X is to Microsoft Office for Windows as Chevy is to Ford. No matter which you use, you should have bought a Toyota.
By default, all distributions (except for Debian, I believe) use the Autohinter instead of the Bytecode Interpreter, due to potential patent issues. They render in very different ways. The Autohinter looks pretty good on LCD displays, with its subpixel hinting (producing fonts that are better in my opinion than Windows Cleartype), but I prefer the Bytecode Interpreter on CRTs.
I'm not sure what you mean by "native" support for Linux fonts. All of the font rendering is handled through Libfreetype. You can compile Freetype to use either rendering method, but it defaults to the Autohinter. Freetype supports more than 11 different font formats. This includes standard scalable formats such as Truetype and Type 1 fonts.
For example...
With the Bytecode Interpreter:
http://www.borgerding.org/dropline/zborgerd/screen shots/2.10_1.png
http://www.borgerding.org/dropline/zborgerd/screen shots/2.10_2.png
http://www.dropline.net/gnome/optical/2.10_4.png
http://dlgwiki.dot42.org/uploads/katana.jpg
http://dlgwiki.dot42.org/uploads/katana2.jpg
With the Autohinter:
http://www.dropline.net/gnome/optical/dropline-11. png
http://www.dropline.net/gnome/optical/dropline-9.p ng
http://www.dropline.net/gnome/optical/dropline-5.p ng
Additionally, configuration can cause fonts to look bad. Some people don't like much antialiasing. They prefer the method that Windows uses to antialias only fonts greater than 12 points in size. A combination of the Bytecode Interpreter and disabling antialiasing for small fonts can produce font rendering that is similar to the rendering that most Windows users are familiar with.
If you disable antialiasing while using the Autohinter, you'll find that fonts look terribly uneven and jagged.... They're pretty ugly. If you want to disable antialiasing, you probably should do it only with the Bytecode Interpreter being used as the renderer. This will produce the results that you may be looking for if you prefer Windows-like font rendering.
Lastly, OpenOffice.org's builds have typically included internal Freetype libraries that don't particularly look pretty. There are some workarounds for this. I mention it in the following FAQ:
http://www.dropline.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=825
It's quite outdated, but may provide you with the information that you need to get the font rendering that you prefer. You may also want to try tracking down a package of the Microsoft Core Webfonts. They are legal to distribute as long as they are provided in the original EXE, which may be extract with cabextract. As an alternative, you may be able to find a custom build of OpenOffice.org for your favorite distribution, that links against your system's own freetype libraries instead of the internal OO.o Freetype libraries.
Are the desktop wars over as many had previously assumed. "Microsoft has won". There still seem to be some coals on the fire though. You've got a couple of these open source projects (OpenOffice, NeoOffice, etc). Then you've got Apple doing their thing...starting with Safari, then Keynote, then iWork...Then you've got the whole Apple moving to x86 and everything that brings such as developers showing how easy it is to port to x86 by doing a full conversion during the WWDC and nutty statements like Michael Dell saying he'd sell OS X if Apple decided to sell it as a standalone product.
I'm not really sure the desktop wars are over. Each announcement of stable, full-featured M$ replacement seems to solidify that assumption. Thoughts anyone?
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
I have used the last release candidate to do "real" work on personal projects. That is, I actually tried to get things done with it rather than just clicking around to see how "Mac" it is. I have both MS Office X and NeoOffice/J installed. Office X is used for school work, where I cannot take a chance of my professors not being able to read a document.
1) In the early releases NeoOffice/J was sluggish. There were rendering delays with first word typed, pull-down menus, and switching tools, among other things. I am pleased to say that the interface speed has increased through the release candidate schedule. That said, you will find there are still delays here and there that may bother you. They bothered me until I used Office X again. That product has UI delays as well, just in different places. At this point I think it is a wash.
2) Stability (e.g. random crashes) was an issue on the earlier releases. These have been largely successfully addressed. In fact, when using the last RC to get work done I did not experience any crashes. Very nice.
3) The UI is somewhat confusing, since it departs from some of the standard metaphors we usually see in office software. The primary example is the tight coupling of the different suite functions. Those that are used to using one application for spreadsheets and another for presentations will need to aclimate to a monolithic application. This is not a big change per se; it just takes some getting used to. There are other minor departures, such as the lack of aqua widgets and different locations of buttons and menu items. Once I got used to these differences, I found the product usable for my project work.
All that being said, I have decided to do all my personal project work in NeoOffice/J. Why? The data I generate in my personal projects is valuable to me personally. I would like to maximize the chances of being able to read it in the distant future. Since the Open Office file format is completely open and documented, I believe that the OO.org file format has the greatest chance of being read 15-20 years from now. If there is not any software in 15-20 years that can read the format, then due to the open licensing on the format I could write/hire someone to write a program to read the documents. Try doing that with some archaic closed format. I will deal with quirks today to enable access to the my data tomorrow.
-LLM
Annoy a Conservative...
For that reason alone (and the price), I recommend NeoOffice. I've been using it as my sole office application for some time now with no problems.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
I'd love tgo switch to NeoOffice or Pages or another decednt alternative to Word on the OS X platform, but they all ignore a feature of vital importance to professional writers like myself: A halfway decent word count function. In Pages, you can do a word count on the whole document, but not on a highlighted selection. And in NeoOffice, you have to go through an enormous song-and-dance with the Tools-->Statistics dialog (before manually selecting a tab!) to get the word count (a method that also precludes getting the word count of a highlighted selection). There's tons of room for a word count box in the status bar at the bottom of document panes in NeoOffice, but is it there? Nope. In Word, I can see how much I've written by looking at the status bar or by by executing a quick keyboard commmand, and I can run it on selections as easily as the whole document. Everyone who's trying to make Word-beaters for OS X just don't get it. I don't like using MS bloatware, especially on the Mac, but for now Word is the only real option for anyone who earns his or her living as a writer.
*cough*
Still trying to get through to their server, but the Slashdot text certainly doesn't give me any confidence in the developers.
Except that's not a standard Macintosh feature. Real Mac programs don't have installers, they have .app bundles and can be installed by simply dragging them to 'Programs' (or any other location of your choice) and uninstalled by dragging them to the trash.
Up till now it seemed to be mostly Microsoft products that break that model. Is the NeoOffice/J team trying way too hard to follow MS?
When their servers come back up I'll be trying it, nonetheless... with high hopes but low expectations.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I've been using NeoOffice/J on my Macs for a couple of years now. (I have a rather dated review here.) Without a doubt, it's my favourite office suite for OSX.
What's really amazing is that almost all of the coding work is done by Patrick Luby (pluby) with a fairly small group of very dedicated testers and contributors. Despite the complexity of the code and the magnitude of the task, Patrick and the rest of his small team of volutneers has managed to release the only viable alternateive to MS Office for Mac OSX.
I have been installing NeoOffice/J on lab machines at work for over a year now. NO/J 1.1 is a significant improvement over the earlier versions. It now integrates with the menubar, opens and closes like a Mac app, and even uses OSX's keyboard shortcuts. Heck, they even managed to integrate it with SpotLight!
For everyone out there using a Mac, be sure to check it out. Also, if you like the program don't forget to donate. Even $50 is much appreciated. Think of it, an entire office suite on your platform of choice with perfect interoperability with Linux, Windows and Solaris. And it's Open Source. Surely that's worth a donation.
Over time, it appeared that NeoOffice/J was developing faster, and it would be easier to get it to a usable state than the OpenOffice OS X port, so the OpenOffice OS X port was abandoned. NeoOffice/J is the `official' OS X version of OpenOffice. Additionally, the NeoOffice/J people will be handling the official port of OpenOffice 2.0 to OS X.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Office for the Mac isn't perfect, but it is far nicer than the Windows version. I don't have any real complaints about Office aside from the bloat, which if reduced, would be nice. But otherwise... it beats the Windows version by far. Waaayyy far.
The real issue isn't Java - it's javax.swing, the Java Swing toolkit, and the java.awt, the Abstract Window Toolkit . AWT looks awful, has a clumsy event model, and is low level and clunky. Swing provides higher level widgets, but an over-complex API, and it's still slow as hell.
Ever tried SWT from Eclipse? It's the Java widget toolkit that doesn't suck! (as much).
That said, I'm very happy with C++ and Qt. Well, except the C++ bit, but I find Java just as gag-worthy in different ways (Java 1.5 goes some way to rectifying the issues with generics and the collections framework, though. It's still WAY too verbose and static for a truly nice language, though).
Yes, you are missing something. If you've used (or read reviews) of the Mac (X11) version of OpenOffice.org, you'd know none of these features are present in OOo. Maybe that's not a big deal for the Slashdot crowd, but for the average Mac user who's looking for a fully-featured and/or free/Free alternative to Microsoft--especially if the person has tried to use the X11 version or has read reviews--these are important features to tout. It all depends on the audience....
And five years is the total time since the first work on porting OOo to the Mac began. NeoOffice/J has really only been in development for two years, primarily by one developer in his spare time....
Yuck. Who wants to see that on their Mac every day?
And, what ever happened to the fully native Aqua interface that Sun promised for Open Office three full years ago:
So, let's recap. In 2002 Sun promises to fully support the Aqua interface using Java. Like so many other Java on the desktop promises from Sun, they never make good on this promise. Has anyone ever held Sun's feet to the fire on this and the hundreds of other Java promises they've made in the past 10 years?Three years after Sun promises Mac OS X support another team of developers finally ship something for Mac OS X that has no Aqua interface at all... except for the MENUBAR.
My analysis of this sad state of affairs is Java has failed on the desktop.
True, it doesn't ship with the OS, but OSXPM is an easy add-on and does the job fine.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I prefer AppleWorks for my office suite, which comes free with new Macs .. yes, it's an outdated office suite, but it works, it's more responsive and loads much faster than NeoOffice/J.
iWork is $79, Mac MS Office is $399. If one was choosing between these two, I would recommend the iWork not just because of pricing but because of the vendor: Apple is more likely to care about their own users while MS has potential to drop their product quality because Mac users aren't as important to MS than they are to Apple. Microsoft has already started to pull away from Microsoft Windows Media Player for OS X (currently lacks AVI, MPEG, MP3 support, playlist, drag-n-drop support, displayal of filename during playback, doesn't stop screensavers from running during video playback, etc.). MS has also announced that they've stopped development for Internet Explorer for Mac. The few people that still use IE for Mac probably do so because they've grown accustomed to it from the times before Mozilla + Safari, or because of the Microsoft brand name. I think people need to stop thinking that the Microsoft brand is the best choice, especially on the Mac platform which competes with Windows for marketshare.