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Mac StarOffice in development
ChrisRijk writes "According to this MacWeek article Sun has started work on a port, though time-frame
is currently unknown. After Sun made StarOffice freely downloadable
for anyone (1.2M downloads so far) they got 6000 calls asking for a Mac
port. They also mention that Sun has doubled the number of engineers working
on StarOffice. Current StarOffice ports are Solaris (x86 and SPARC), Linux (x86 only), Windows and OS/2 in several languages.
"
This is A Good Thing. If StarOffice runs on all common platforms, it could compete with Office (not likely, but possible) to be the file format of choice. Competition is another Good Thing.
I hope StarOffice makes a strong impact.
Different languages? Does this mean they have several versions for different langauges? Why not just support internationalization through gettext?
Hopefully, if they're porting to MacOS, that means there will soon be a port to GNU/Linux on the PowerPC. I hate it when companies decide to port to only one Linux architecture(i386) and not to the other popular hardware architectures (like mine). Oh well.
is for the Sun engineers to show us what they are made of. now if they were worth their wieght in code they would un-bloat Star-Office a tad. There is no way that Star Office cant be optimized or reworked so that it can run faster, with a smaller resident memory size. You would think with 1.2 Million downloads in 3 months that Sun would do a little alchemy and turn their iron into gold.
"The importance of using technology in the right way has never been more clear."
Sure, it's nice. Sure competition is good. But the somple fact is that I do not trust sun to do what is best for me.
When they do something evil with the license (and I promis you they will) I'll be laughing a heartly laugh from my Koffice application (with source)
Fish! LipHo
Now, if they do a MAC port and its good. Then we will have some solid competition with Corel Office Suit. The reason why I say Corel Office Suite is that no corperation who's running Windows on the desktop will buy StarOffice [or use] instead they will use Office by MicroShaft! Instead, if we pentrated through Mac and LINUX, we might eventually get them to adopt LINUX [or Macs *g*].
Personally, I find however StarOffice a little bloated [maybe just slow] compared to Corel Word Perfect [well, one's a Suite, one's an WP]. I think if they optimized the code a bit they would be seriously competition with Corel on LINUX side and prehaps a bit with Corel and MicroShaft on Mac Side.
All and All, a Good Thing Since Competition is Good. Altough this will put strain on Corel.
"1.2M downloads so far...."
And Quake3DemoTest had over a million downloads within 3 days of release? Something's wrong here....
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
Where did the Mac folk request their port? It seems to me that BeOS, since it's more of a desktop OS than the Unicies, would be very appropriate for a port. (Though I'm happy to see it on the Unicies as well. ;) Plus, I'm sure that Sun can spare the engineers, now that it's cozy with Be on the Java front.
Rip out their "desktop" - I have a desktop. I just want to start a plain word processor/spreadsheet/presentation program - not a new desktop
Reduce the memory usage. How comes that just starting the StarOffice "desktop" takes 64MB? Even EMACS takes less memory with the usual modes loaded (GNUS, AUC-tex,....)
Make their postscript-engine work with color on Unix. Yes, I had to make slides regularly this spring for teaching. On occation, StarOffice would drop colors on parts of my slides (no, it's not a memory problem in the printer). The routine of making slides in Linux, walking to a co-workers Windows-box and use the Windows version to generate valid postscript then walk back to Linux to print quickly got tireing. Ohh, and when it's working in Linux they may be able to patch the Solaris version too...I had the same problems with Sparc/Solaris
Otherwise, I like StarOffice (well...I've mainly used their presentation-graphics proggie). It is a pretty decent program, doesn't crash and has a nice set of features. Fix the above and it's worth every $$.
-- "Life is a bitch - and she hates me..."
Star Office is released under a license Sun claims is Open Source, correct? I am well aware that it does not really meet the standards of Open Source software, but in theory Sun is supposed to make the source code available under their own license, correct?
So where is the source code? I use Linux on an Alpha platform and would like to run Star Office, if only to read the Word documents that people
tend to like mailing out these days. If the source was out there, I think compiling it would be trivial. However, a scan of Sun's site does not show it up anywhere obvious.
Anyone have an explanation?
Just my thoughts.
1. Release Star Office in a gpl like license. (It will never be true GPL, to much politics) The license should allow it to be ported freely to any platform, and allow code be used for other projects, but at the same time, allowing SUN to have control of there "offical" source, to make releases and to provide "supported versions". It's already free for anybody to use, so code sharing and code ports aren't that bad, just not supported by SUN. (Big woop).
2. Staroffice (as posted by another person) should have the fat trimmed. Makeing several indepent apps vs one whole big thing. Make it more like MS office, which allows you to run winword, or excel vs Office, in general. (But you could if you wanted to, run the Staroffice Shell, which I have fount great for X Workstations connected to the main server.)
4. If StarOffice was more free to do things with the source (less restrictive) then some good hacks would work on it, port it, tweak it, make it faster, and possibly make it a very good product. (Ties in with 1)
E. Port it to Qt/KDE libs? Or am I dreaming?
http://www.freebsd.org
Anyone have any technical info on StarOffice, like what language it is written in, and more importantly, does it use some sort of porting kit to make it cross platform (this might explain its bloat)?
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In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
Wasn't there a Mac version before, back in 5.0, when Stardivision was doing it? And is Sun still working on the Java client version?
They shouldn't have to do too much work to port that thing, just clean up whatever they did from 5.0 to 5.1...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
-the original AC
No I want more features instead, why would I want a small, compact usfull program, when I can have a wordprocessor with built in file system. How about "Now with embeded Linux kernel!" You could use your star office desktop as a virtual machine upon which to launch many other copies of other operating systems
</SARCASM>
I've got a feeling that the developers will want to add more features to compete with MS office, rather than reduce the code size.
People need to change their focus from features to solid code. Thats what Linux has got a good balance of. Maybe open source (proper open source, not the SCSL) would help, maybe it wouldn't. I'm sure that star office is more complicated than Mozila.
I think that open source would help, evenutally, maybe they could just release the source code now, and then carry on developing their version. Why not? I bet they want to concentrate on the star portloo anyway, so why not do that.
-- Hulver's site
Hey, who says you have to trust anyone?
Moreover, what are you doing expecting others to do what is best for you? That is 100% your job!
Having competition in the marketplace will assuredly make that job easier, if there are more choices monopoly power cannot be exercised, and you'll have more options to employ in that quest to do what is best for you.
I believe Sun porting Star Office to the mac platform to be a great thing, even if I don't end up using it.
Like the mac os or not, isn't this a further implication that the mac platform isn't as dead as everyone has said it was? And again, like the mac or not, isn't that a good thing? Anytime we're given only one choice (or some small number) doesn't it reduce the motivation for improvement and customer care/service?
That's why I really like this development. It shows that there is more life to the home computer industry than just that which one software and one hardware vendor (microsoft/intel) contribute.
With more choices come more options, and more opportunities for us to decide what is best for ourselves...isn't that the idea that echoes through most of the slashdot/linux/opensource world? If you don't like it one way, do it another.
...that one day, soon, I will be able to work in an environment free from Microsoft products.
When I chose my OS, I looked at Windows, Mac and Linux. Windows was flawed in so many ways, and "Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing", so naturally I chose the Mac. When it came to choosing applications, Wordperfect seemed reasonable, but now they haven't updated Wordperfect for Mac in almost 2 years, and to maintain compatibility with others, I was forced to use MS Word. When it comes to spreadsheets, I never even had a choice. Excel has 95% marketshare on the Mac, and nobody wants to challenge that.
When Sun's new Office suite comes out, I will be the first on my block to install and use it. If it holds up after a month or so, I will comfortably remove the last remaining traces of MS from my hard drive, and what a glorious day that will be.
Reality has a liberal bias
I don't care, I'll take it. I'll pay money for it. I'll let them screw me with the license. I'll tolerate the bloat. I'll let them fill up my RAM until it chokes. I don't care. I run MacOS and LinuxPPC, and I am desperate. I have to have a program, any program, that will satisfy the endless, arrogant and incessant demands for Word-compatible documents to which I am constantly subjected.
.docs they send me, but the results look like sheep dip.
I got an old version of ClarisWorks pre-installed on the MacOS side, and it's perfectly fine with me, because I Just Don't Care (TM) about all the feature bloat that most Office suites supply. Once in a while, I need to cut a letter to the utility company or some damn thing. I want to type it up, print it, and stuff it an envelope. Cheap, ratty software is all I need for that.
But when I want to send someone a document electronically, or they want to send one to me, almost everyone expects MICROSOFT WORD !!! People treat me like a circus freak when I tell them I don't have it (and don't want it). I've met people who literally cannot conceive of a computer that doesn't have MS Office anywhere on it. I try to use RTF translators, or use the built-in filters in ClarisWorks to read the
Of course, the ideal solution to this nonsense would be to end these proprietary formats and establish industry norms for document exchange. You know, like they've had in normal industries for decades. But then, that would mean that the software industry would have to become normal. Oh well.
So beat me, whip me, feature-bloat me, take my money, exhaust my RAM, and license me into slavery, but just gimme StarOffice for the Mac and make the pain go away.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
I hate to say it, but that other office program runs a lot faster on the same machine (I ignore the loading time, since that comparison is unfair; the evil competition has all its libraries loaded from the OS at boot-time). The menus react very sluggishly if the machine is under some load (playing MP3s and with several Netscapes/xterms open). This is not the case with ApplixWare and other programs, so if the bloat is stripped from StarOffice, we could end up with the slick app we are all waiting for. ;-)
Of course StarOffice is the most complete office package for Linux. Nobody wants to lose that advantage... and everybody wants to keep the features that are *important* (such as a window manager within a window manager, an extra desktop, taskbar, a reload button etc.)
There actually was a StarOffice port for MacOS, but that was a long time ago.
If you got one of the very first Power Macs, actually, the System Software CD came with a bunch of software demos. One of these was for StarOffice, which (incidentally) was the first PowerPC-native word processor (you only got StarWriter; I don't know what happened to the rest of it).
It was fully payware on the Mac side, unfortunately; no "free for non-commercial use." And the word processor alone was $200. And I suppose I should point out that it was never all that stable, and the interface wasn't that great. That's probably why it never caught on with Macs. In the end, StarDivision stopped developing their MacOS port (after version 3.0 if I'm not mistaken). It's good to see them coming back to the Mac again. Though I'd be happier if there were a LinuxPPC port too.
I hope it can read/ write other file formats properly.. then I'll switch.
.doc .
I think the world needs a universal word processing file format (html doesn't count niether does pdf). That way the wp programs could stand on their own merit, not just compatability with
Every office from time to time needs to read others documents and that seems why Word does so well. PDF is a major player on the web because the reader is free.
A good universal presentation/spreadsheet/ database format would be usefull too.
Wasn't XML supposed to solve this?
You may be interested to know that they (Sun) are working to make StarOffice's file format use XML. It doesn't have 100% "Word" file support (because Microsoft doesn't give out enough info - hint hint to DoJ) but they're working on it...
We need Star Office to come to BeOS as well! SUN, if you can hear us, please port it to BeOS as well! Thanks, E.
There should be a choice for the desktop office software on the Mac. Without office software, Apple loses another niche market (corporate marketroids). Even if there is choice, there won't be any *competition*. It's a money sinkhole for Sun, and Microsoft would rather write for its own OS. They will quickly try to find ways of getting their respective users onto different platforms they have already ported to. Don't expect either company to bend over backwards making the Mac version much better.
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I'm surprised Sun didn't do this before -- they always like to try stepping on Microsoft toes (then whine when they get beaten up).
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E2 IN2 IE?
AFAIK, StarOffice is written in C++ to the StarView toolkit. The latter is Stardivision's own cross-platform toolkit which has enabled them to port the software to several platforms without too much trouble. Unleash objdump and nm on the StarOffice libraries to get some insight in the internals of StarView.
--frank[at]unternet.org
YES!!! --> "Rip out their "desktop" - I have a desktop. I just want to start a plain word processor/spreadsheet/presentation program - not a new desktop"
There are a lot of very stupid dependencies on undocumented "features" in Star Office. If they worked on getting rid of those they would do wonders to improve their stability and portability...
Regards,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do this! I can't stand the fact that it has a Start button. It's supposed to be an application, not a wannabe desktop.
Given Sun's message of "write once, run anywhere", it seems odd that they need to port StarOffice at all! Wasn't this one of the main objectives of Java? It seems that a company that's touting this strength should be living by their own mantra.
StarPortal will have a Java client, but that software's not even in beta yet...
My school just got a brand new G3 lab
[UCSD AP&M basement, next to UAPE, for my fellow students]
I'm not sure which version, but StarOffice is installed on every one of the new machines. The interface isn't completely Mac-ified, but it's elegant in a number of ways and fairly intuitive.
As far as the linux version is concerned, if they're not going to release the source, I wish Sun would precompile SO for all those other architectures (ppc, alpha, etc.)
I've found a MacOS runtime app for BeOS and linux PPC which can be found at SheepShaver.com. The linux version is in beta, and you should take it up with them to port it to linux x86. You can read all about it at their site.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
sorry, this only works if you have a PPC box as it allows a copy of the MacOS to run natively as a process. It will probably never be available for x86.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Er... they could write it to the Carbon APIs, which would allow it to run on both MacOS 9.x _and_ OS X client while taking advantage of the fully buzzword-compliant OS X.
These are exactly the problems I see as well (with the addition of their poor MDI). PLEASE, PLEASE, before anything else, get rid of that start menu. A normal drop-down menu is much more sensible -- maybe they just need someone to show them how interfaces should work -- Microsoft is not a good place to look.
"Whatever can go wrong, will." --Finagle's Law
I've been a staroffice user since the 4.X versions. I still have the ability to boot windows NT in vmware and run MSOffice, but staroffice and xlHtml and wvHtml pretty much take care of my basic needs to decrypt email attachments.
.staroffice dir under ~ if it doesn't exist. There shouldn't be a need for running "setup /net" for multiuser install. Make staroffice understand symlinks.
Sun needs to fix the following issues with staroffice IMHO:
1) release the stardivision windows -> unix/win/os2 porting kit under GPL. It could have been used by so many projects already to bring more windows software to unix. I believe it's only used for StarOffice currently, and Sun wants to re-do staroffice as a portal... Sun PLEASE GIVE THIS BACK TO THE COMMUNITY AS GPL. Give it to WINE!
2) make staroffice a true multiuser app. Ever try to install SO on an nfs server and have a few dozen people access it? Too hard. SO should *automatically* create a
3) make staroffice able to import powerpoint 95 and excel spreadsheets generated from excel 95 with Excel 97 compat patch installed.
4) release frequently. Re-build binaries when necessary to support newer kernels. Build for lots of different platforms.
5) make the "staroffice takes over your unix desktop and makes it look like win95" an option that is not enabled by default
6) make it possible to do a non-graphical install.
7) prove your committment to the unix community by making staroffice a true competitor to MSOffice, not just "the only game in town"
Regularly.
Like every 5-15 minutes. One roomie is using his machine to write a book, edit another, and I just need to write simple business letters. StarOffice is driving him insane, and it's only by will alone that he is resisting going back to Word.
Frankly, I'm now moving back to Wordperfect for both the linux and windows machines, and more than happy to pay for the priveledge.
As for Mac users, I suggest Nisus Writer. I don't know how perfect thier .doc filters are, but at least it never crashed when I used it.
Just put "exec soffice" (assuming its directory is in your path) in your .xinitrc file and nothing else and it will run without a window manager. And it will run just fine without one.
A GPL solution running on PPC:
http://www.ibrium.se/linux/mac_on_linux.html
Please, GPL StarOffice!!! This will allow people to reuse Sun's code in other projects (such as KOffice) without the fear that Sun will try anything against the community, and will allow Sun to reuse other people's code in StarOffice as well. Please, GPL StarOffice!!!
Well, coinsidentally I recently rebuilt my NT4 desktop at the office (it was corrupted.)
On a whim I didn't reinstall MS-Office, and instead installed StarOffice - likely because a coworker gave me a StarOffice CD, and I couldn't find the MS-Office CD.
So far, I'm plesently surprised. For me, it's stable and as useful as the MS product. I didn't like the "desktop" feature, but after turning that feature off it's great
I was surprised there was no Mac version, and my shop has a considerably large population of Mac users. So the Mac version seems like a good move within my environment.
At this point only time will tell if Star Office will do it for me. Surprisingly, the Palm Pilot desktop installer expected to find MS-Word and MS-Excel. I wonder how many else of the products I use make (poor) MS-Office assumptions?
Why bring up women, jews, and fords?
I couldn't agree more. The interface of StarOffice just sucks.
Don't forget there's a quick way to read those dirty MS word documents instantly from the command line:
strings documentname.doc | less
or direct it into a file into your favorite editor or word processor:
strings documentname.doc > newdocumentname.txt
Its great for reading resumes and cover letters too, since word documents often include previous junk from a memory scratch buffer during quicksaves. What this means is that previous revisions that the author had not intended might unintentionaly show up for your viewing in the final.
I'm curious to see how Sun handles the interface issue on the Mac. They can't use MDI. The Mac's windowing system doesn't even support it. They'd have to hack something together themselves. If they do a direct port keeping the Linux interface in tact, no Mac users will go near it, especially since, unlike Linux, Mac OS has MS Office.
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This space unintentionally left unblank.
I wonder how StarOffice will compete with AppleWorks 6, which is already in development and has a large feature set. In fact, looks like the thing is fully Carbon-compliant and is portable between 9.x and X. Check out the new features (although I dislike some of the MS Office-like "enhancements"):
AppleInsider article on upcoming AppleWorks 6.0 suite
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Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
try mswordview , its great app i use it to translate .doc's to .html and it works without any problems go get it on freshmeat
i>Rip out their "desktop" - I have a desktop. I just want to start a plain word processor/spreadsheet/presentation program - not a new desktop
Exactly. My one and only complaint about StarOffice.
Well, actually, I hate the "Windowsizing" it does inside of there as well. I have my "close window" button on the left in KDE. It makes much more sense to me, even though I have never used a Mac in my life.
I can live with it though. StarOffice is an extremely well-polished office package.
Just let the WM do the WM work, and I'll be very happy.
Now the question is, will StarOffice for the Mac take advantage of the Carbon libraries? I would love to use it on OS X next year, and if they are going to do a port they might as well get Carbonation out of the way now.
If they don't, I wouldn't be surprised if StarOffice quickly becomes ignored by Mac users who want to take advatage of the features Carbon offers and decide use AppleWorks 6 instead.
As a Mac user, I must admit that I am glad that StarOffice is finally coming to Macintosh. However, one feature/flaw of StarOffice is the method in which it attains portability: namely, its interface is exactly the same on all platforms. Window, OS/2 and KDE have close enough environments that this doesn't show quite as much (though on my OS/2 box you can definitely tell this is NOT a normal OS/2 app). However, Mac users tend to be very particular of their interface. Take a look at the reaction of the Mac community in '95, when Microsoft unvieled Word 6, and then had to issue a DOWNGRADE to Word 5.1 because of the horendous job they had done on the new version. And Word 6 wasn't even that Windows like.
I really look forward to StarOffice, but unless they make the interface at least slightly more Mac-like, I'll wait for AppleWorks 6 (screenshots now available at http://www.appleinsider.com/) or for a Mac port of AbiWord for Macintosh.
As reported at
http://www.appleinsider.com/, Apple is
working on an incredible update to
AppleWorks, called AppleWorks 6.0. This will
be where my money goes - I don't need StarOffice
(for all the reasons cited before and more, but
my personal hates are its huge memory footprint
and stupid desktop environment). There is a
tremendous amount of power in AppleWorks, and
it is IMHO the only suite you need for the Mac.
To hell with Microsoft, to hell with Sun.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
Ok, Sun needs to do the following:
1) Release source and make it full GPL
2) improve performance and memory footprint.
3) add yours here
But the one thing all of you missed (except one person that hinted at it when he suggested to kill the desktop, just didn't go far enough) is to MODULARIZE StarOffice (on all platforms).
Part of SO's problem is it's this HUGE monolithic application. Kill the Desktop metaphor in StarOffice. Break out all the main programs into separate applications. Use Shared libs where possible. This alone will help StarOffice dramiatically.
Then they need to improve file format compatability, add more formats, improve the overal product, optimize the heck out of it (really redo or get rid of the mail application. it sux) and more.
-- DuckWing
Then again, do they support Solaris/x86?
Yes, they do.
Adam
Adam
"And the death of dreams will be a beautiful end..." - DIJ
I remember a mac port of staroffice back at about version 3.1, or am I a dumb cracker ?
I will move to the MacOS system if OS/2 ever dies. It would be nice to see my favorite Suite Mac-ready.
This is A Good Thing. If StarOffice runs on all common platforms, it could compete with Office (not likely, but possible) to be the file format of choice. Competition is another Good Thing.
Perhaps a more realistic and better goal is that with increased popularity of StarOffice the marketing/nontechnial people realize that it's not a safe assumption that everyone is using MS Office, and therefore everyone reverts to something a bit more flexible like XML/XSL.
In essence, the file format battle dies.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Betting on the odds, the UI for StartOffice is going to suck, it will be a horrible Mac application, and Mac users are going to reject it as a result.
I can see how this makes sense from Sun's perspective -- create a multiplatform office environment to take back some control -- but I don't think they're very well equipped to tackle the Mac market. Sun is not exactly well-known for good UI or good Mac support (cough, cough, Java, cough).
Apple's consumer models already ship with AppleWorks, which is a capable application suite. The professionals generally buy MS Office, which is actually pretty good. Sun coming out with a half-assed, ugly, straight Unix port will mean a close zero adoption rate.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Indeed this was a real crappy port and I hope SUN won't do this again. Even M$-Office is better written on this point.
Hub