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OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X Alpha Released!

Posted by Zonk on from the copy-and-paste-how-do-you-break-that dept.

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."

1 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Let me explain what I meant by LKM · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > 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?