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Sun Joins Mac Open Office Development
widhalmt writes "In a blog post, a developer at Sun Microsystems announces that Sun will help with porting Open Office to Mac OS X. The open source office suite is well known on Linux and Windows, but does not have a native version on Mac OS. For a long time Sun did not want to join the development of that port but now they will actively push it."
OpenOffice.org runs on Mac OS X under X11.
NeoOffice is an independently developed version of OpenOffice.org 2.1 which runs on Mac OS X natively and without the need for X11. I've been using it for years.
First we get news that Microsoft was recently acting all Mac Happy, and now Sun is acting Mac Happy. My, my, my, but these coincidences of timing in the software world never cease to boggle the mind!
Okay, I got Linux installed. So where's the free beer everyone keeps talking about??
Sun already owns the rights to Lighthouse Design's application suite. Since these were originally developed for NeXTstep/OpenStep, they should be relatively easy to migrate to Cocoa. I'd sure like to see an Improv/Quantrix like spreadsheet tool put a stake through the heart of Excel!
From the blog:
The problem has always been that OO.o makes assumptions about GUI development that are well-suited to X11 and Windows, and not well-suited to Aqua. The question is, can someone who's learning Mac development as he goes push changes back to OO.o to make it more suitable for Aqua and other GUI toolkits? Can he do it before Sun changes their mind and de-funds the Mac port? Sun has a habit of funding things for about six months and then getting cold feet.
Which reminds me: I should throw some money at Ed and Patrick for their continued work on NeoOffice, which uses Java as a GUI adapter (!) to get OO.o tolerable on the Mac
Sun is pushing for a non-Java, non-X11 native solution.
I hope you appreciate the irony of that statement.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
It still pales in comparison to MS Office.
Yes, I am complimenting Microsoft -- I am sure I'll be flamed for it. But frankly, they make the best office suite, and since theirs is the standard look and feel (although the new Office is a departure), the other guys have to play catchup.
I would love to use OpenOffice, I just hate the look and feel and have always been more comfortable in Microsoft Office.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
So I say, bring it on! I think that getting a good implementation of OOo running natively under Aqua is key in the cause of reducing reliance on Microsoft. People switching to Linux obviously are going to use OOo or some other open format, but still too many people switching to Mac are relying on Microsoft. It'll be curious to see whether they take Firefox's approach to have the interface be consistent across the board, or if they try and take advantage of OS X's toolkits and design guides to make it a true Mac application.
Disclaimer: I am a founder of the NeoOffice project.
Quote: and became an even worse idea when Apple deprecated the Java-Cocoa bridge
We never used the CocoaJava bridge at all. I guess you never bothered to read the source code. In fact, we use very little Java at all as is pointed out by the ohloh source code analysis of our open CVS. There's little Objective-C as we do most of the logic in C++ and call out to ObjC when required. There are some other stats there you may find intriguing as well like the estimated man-years and cost it will take to approximate our code.
Trust me, once any OS X port of OOo starts getting font handling and input methods correct, it'll slow down as well. This is true especially for Asian and other foreign languages. The bottleneck is in Apple's ATSUI and how it mismatches to the underlying OOo code. Has nothing to do with Java at all. Speed in a vaporware demo is one thing; carrying speed into a functional product is something different completely.
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