Back to OOo 1.1.5
by
vanka
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Does it have the new OOo 2.0 GUI? No? I'm not interested then, I'll wait for 2.0 to come out. From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use.
By the way, what's up with Slashdot? While the new look is kinda cool, why does it take several page reloads to display correctly in Firefox. I mean, you would think that they would made sure that the new design worked with Firefox.
2.0 Beta For MS Files
by
kg4gyt
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I've found that 2.0 Beta has very few bugs, from what I've seen, almost the same beta that gmail is still beta. But anyways, OOo 2.0 Beta seems to handle the microsoft documents extremly well. Well worth the download.
Re:Version 1.1.5?
by
HUADPE
·
· Score: 5, Informative
OpenOffice.org 2.0 is a beta. 1.1.5 is the stable release. The beta is not supposed to be for general consumption, it is a prototype which may have bugs and be unstable.
-- This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
And is also its Achilles heel.
by
soullessbastard
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
As someone who's wrangled with the OOo build system since 2001, I have to respectfully disagree. While it is good that it supports so many different operating systems, the build system is also one of the major Achilles heels of OOo. Some examples:
It builds its own build tools as part of its bootstrapping process. This makes it near impossible to cross-compile without completely retooling the build system (a pain for doing any type of single-machine PPC & x86 OS X builds).
It has its own "make" equivalent that encodes module dependencies and language localizations in a custom format. To add appropriate dependencies you need to learn yet another makefile system. Don't mention trying to figure out the module build order without actually running a compile. Try it sometime if you want to lose your mind.
It uses quite a few preprocessing tools for custom file formats for processing including slots files, IDL files that generate more headers, resource compilers, and more. Custom toolchains make figuring out what generated what file even more fun to discover.
Some of the build tools have dependencies on versions of Java that do not exist on all the platforms on which the application might be able to run, preventing it from even compiling on those platforms.
The end result of all of this is that the entire 8 million line plus project is quite dependent on its build system in order to successfully compile. The system is so intricate that most all of the attempts to move it to a different system, such as XCode, have failed. This is a bummer. From a Mac perspective, it sucks ass to be forced to use command line tools for such a huge project. You lose access to such useful tools as the symbolic browser information (e.g. "Jump to Definition" for a symbol in an editor file) and within-project searches. Not to mention you don't gain access to other nice things in the environment like distributed compiles. Probably the worst side effect, however, is that most Mac developers aren't command-line junkies (unless they were MPW freaks like me). They've been raised on CodeWarrior and other great IDEs. It's a real turn-off to have to learn an arcane command line build system that is used for only one program and will probably not give you any useful skills for any other applications on the Mac platform. Forget about being able to examine the interface in InterfaceBuilder or ResEdit, too.
The whole complexity of learning the build system and all of the custom formats involved has been a real turn-off for many a Mac developer who just take a look at the build instructions and vomit. The lack of standard dev tools has definitely hindered my productivity, and I'm sure I'm not alone. A fantastic build system is one that doesn't get in a developer's way and on Macs at least, that's most definitely not the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it have the new OOo 2.0 GUI? No? I'm not interested then, I'll wait for 2.0 to come out. From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use.
By the way, what's up with Slashdot? While the new look is kinda cool, why does it take several page reloads to display correctly in Firefox. I mean, you would think that they would made sure that the new design worked with Firefox.
I've found that 2.0 Beta has very few bugs, from what I've seen, almost the same beta that gmail is still beta. But anyways, OOo 2.0 Beta seems to handle the microsoft documents extremly well. Well worth the download.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 is a beta. 1.1.5 is the stable release. The beta is not supposed to be for general consumption, it is a prototype which may have bugs and be unstable.
This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
As someone who's wrangled with the OOo build system since 2001, I have to respectfully disagree. While it is good that it supports so many different operating systems, the build system is also one of the major Achilles heels of OOo. Some examples:
The end result of all of this is that the entire 8 million line plus project is quite dependent on its build system in order to successfully compile. The system is so intricate that most all of the attempts to move it to a different system, such as XCode, have failed. This is a bummer. From a Mac perspective, it sucks ass to be forced to use command line tools for such a huge project. You lose access to such useful tools as the symbolic browser information (e.g. "Jump to Definition" for a symbol in an editor file) and within-project searches. Not to mention you don't gain access to other nice things in the environment like distributed compiles. Probably the worst side effect, however, is that most Mac developers aren't command-line junkies (unless they were MPW freaks like me). They've been raised on CodeWarrior and other great IDEs. It's a real turn-off to have to learn an arcane command line build system that is used for only one program and will probably not give you any useful skills for any other applications on the Mac platform. Forget about being able to examine the interface in InterfaceBuilder or ResEdit, too.
The whole complexity of learning the build system and all of the custom formats involved has been a real turn-off for many a Mac developer who just take a look at the build instructions and vomit. The lack of standard dev tools has definitely hindered my productivity, and I'm sure I'm not alone. A fantastic build system is one that doesn't get in a developer's way and on Macs at least, that's most definitely not the case.
ed