OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X Alpha Released!

An anonymous reader writes "Nearly 6 years after announcing a Mac port, OpenOffice.org has released the first release of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X that can finally run without X11!! An alpha is available for download today, but a lot of help is still needed to make OpenOffice.org available for Mac OS X. The site is very blunt: 'WARNING: THIS SOFTWARE MAY CRASH AND MAY DESTROY YOUR DATA DO NOT USE THIS SOFTWARE FOR REAL WORK IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT. This is an alpha test version so that developers and users can find out what works and not, and make comments on how to improve it.' Currently missing functionality includes printing, pdf export, copy/pasting, and multiple monitors. That said, if you're interested in participating you can visit the Mac team to figure out how you can help today."

Comments

Neooffice - differences?

[cyman777]

OK, so I will start the obvious thread:

What are the differences to Neooffice?
Are they working together?

Besides the slow startup I feel Neooffice already has taken that niche, hasn't it?

Re:Neooffice - differences?

[jj13]

The main difference is that neooffice apparently runs through java on the mac, which is why it takes forever to load and can be very slow on occasion. neooffice is at best a substitute, until a native version is released (which is what is being announced today).

Let me point out something I noticed on the site. I'm a budding mac developer, and in reading the dev FAQ I saw that openoffice is being ported using the Carbon API. This is the old API that apple introduced for developers to more easily port their old OS 9 apps to the "new and shiny" OS X, back when it was actually new and shiny in 2001. Carbon does NOT allow you to take full advantage of OS X features, and it's use is frowned upon for new projects by apple and the dev community.

I'm guessing most of openoffice is written in C++ (never actually looked at the source yet), and Carbon is based in C++ so I'm also guessing they didn't want to rewrite everything in objective-c in order to use Cocoa (the "new" API that is like....7 years old now?). In any case, I'm disappointed that the team isn't going for a more thorough port that will let openoffice shine against the competition. Maybe I should put my keyboard where my mouth is and learn the intricacies of mac porting, hehehe.

Re:Neo Office

[GauteL]

"Why the OpenOffice people are hostile to this project is something I've stopped
wondering about... today's announcement of the "first" port of OOO to Mac not
using X11 just shows how badly a project hurts itself when it refuses to work
with others "

Licensing. NeoOffice code can not be reused in OpenOffice.org due to their relicensing to GPL from the original LGPL. This is done on purpose from NeoOffice, and the relationship between OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice is that of host and parasite, rather than a symbiotic one.

Still needs X11

[AttilaSz]

http://porting.openoffice.org/mac page says:

In order to run the OpenOffice.org you need to have X11 installed.

Okay, so it allegedly doesn't use X11, but you still need to have it installed? I can see how this is a cheap way of getting around crashes because they forgot to remove some X11 dependency, and it's actually acceptable for alpha software, but it's still really, truly far from elegant...

Let me explain what I meant

[LKM]

> And this is precisely what Apple wants. X11 on the Mac is for Geeks, not for "regular" users. Yeah so maybe just throw out some source code of X11 that barely compiles and you need to fix it yourself. No binary release - then it would be even geekier. :)

Not sure what you're trying to say here.

> The existing issues with X11 are intentional. Yeah. :) That is what I love Mac fanatics - if something is broken in OSX it must be intentional. LoL.

Labelling people "mac fanatics" because you don't understand their reasoning is pretty cheap. In your defense, I admit that I was unclear in my original post. Let me explain what I meant.

Apple depends on Mac OS X having applications which do not exist on other operating systems. It's a competitive advantage. Remember NeXT? They had a nice cross-platform development library which allowed NeXT apps to run on Windows. Initially, Apple planned to keep this in OS X. It was called "yellow box" ("blue box" was for old Mac apps).

Interestingly, the idea didn't survive. Eventually, Cocoa became Mac only. Why? Because Apple wants Mac-only applications.

Another example is Java. Making Java apps look good on a Mac is hard. Apple wants to discourage Mac developers from using Java to create cross-platform apps. They would rather keep apps Mac only.

And this brings us to X11. X11 is awesome if you want to run all kinds of apps on the Mac, but these apps don't behave like Mac apps. Why? Because if they did, it would be trivial to write Mac apps using X11 and then port them to other operating systems. Apple would rather keep these apps on the Mac, thus they are discouraging the use of X11 for Mac apps.

Do you now understand the reasoning, or are you still LOLing at me?