Aqua OpenOffice.org v2.0 Cancelled

Ant writes "According to MacSlash's story, a recent post on OpenOffice.org said no Mac OS X work has been done since 2003 and that there are no longer any plans for an Aqua version 'due to various licensing, political, and fundamental engineering difficulties'. :("

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[Mathiasdm]

I think it's not all that easy to install OpenOffice.org as X11 application.

It requires some work (according to what I heard).
In other words: it won't be popular for 'Joe Average'.

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[Zelet]

Yeah, I run OO under X11 on OS X - but it is as ugly as it is on Linux. Which is pretty damned ugly and slow.

So? Use Neooffice

[mr100percent]

Neooffice [neooffice.org] is coming along nicely, it's finally in Beta. It's got an Aqua interface, Openoffice core, and doesn't require X11.

At least there's still NeoOffice

[dn15]

It's disappointing news, but at least there's still the NeoOffice [neooffice.org] project. Its was originally intended to be a place for experimenting with the issues involved in a native OS X port, but if the office OOo project won't be doing it hopefully NeoOffice will get more support as the primary (er, only) Aqua version.

Heh

[pHatidic]

Except for that in the first paragraph of the article it says that a port is being released by NeoOffice. Did anyone even rtfa?

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[mr100percent]

The non-aqua version which uses the X server works fine... if your objective is to have something that works similar to Linux.
It works fine until you actually want to use the wealth of rich, high-quality fonts that comes with OS X. So I guess that makes the NeoOffice/J project ever more important.

The NeoOffice/J team has done a fantastic job of gradually Aquafying OpenOffice without anywhere near the same resources.

Re:Oh noes!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Not at all. It's a strategic choice. Look at the reasons given in the text:

Regardless of the progress on native porting (or lack thereof), continued X11 development is crucial for the ongoing viability of OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X. There are a number of critical factors that make X11 more relevant then native porting:

X11 Will Always be Faster to Market.....

X11 Will Always be More Stable.....

X11 Will Always Look like Other Platforms.....

X11 is the Ultimate Testing Tool.....

So essentially, what they're saying is, X is their basic graphical platform, they want it to stay that way, and they don't want to divert efforts to do a native port for a machine that they consider a niche market.

They're just focusing on what they think will make the most users happy. Simple as that.

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[JayDiggity]

Functionally, there is little difference except that is certainly slower than running it natively. Where the big problem lies is that Mac users (and I'm one of them) expect coherence and integration in their UI. A Mac version of OpenOffice that runs using X11 will not provide this.
Also, think of anyone who's switched over from Windows with a sour taste in their mouth - they want to avoid Microsoft at all costs, including MS Office. They've heard great things about OpenOffice, but when they go to try it, it's slow and kludgy. Not a very good impression at all.

And there was much... yawning

[UTRules]

Other than being free, I don't see what OpenOffice has to offer on the OS X platform. KeyNote works great, version 2.0 looks even better, and for those who care (and I'm one of them), the file format is xml-based and completely transparent. The OS X paradigm of encapsulating applications and documents in a directory instead of some gigantic kludgy single file means you can go into a .key file and see all the images and movies you've added to the presentation, as well as a single "presentation.apxl" file that contains the presentation itself in a completely obvious xml format.

The new word processing program for the Mac announced at this year's MacWorld, called Pages, was written by the same team that wrote KeyNote and presumably uses the same open file formats.

And these programs together are $79; even less if you can get the .edu discount.

There's no Apple spreadsheet program (yet)...

WTF?!

[Richard_at_work]

Ant writes "According to MacSlash's story, a recent post on OpenOffice.org said no MacOS X work has been done since 2003 and that there are no longer any plans for an Aqua version 'due to various licensing, political, and fundamental engineering difficulties'. :("

It says nothing of the kind. From the link:

Due to various licensing, political, and fundamental engineering difficulties it is likely, for the near future, that native Aqua porting work will be based off of the NeoOffice.org project and not under the direct aegis of OpenOffice.org.

and

For the last year and a half all engineering work focusing on a native Mac OS X OpenOffice.org version has been concentrated in the NeoOffice/J project, using a combination of Java and Carbon technologies to replace X11.

What it looks like is that they have recognised that NEOoffice is a valid port, and any Aqua port by themselves would be a duplication of effort. The Slashdot story blurb makes it sound like they just gave up because it was too hard. They call this journalism now?

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[Dr_LHA]

It just doesn't work very well. It's interface runs slowly (on my 1Ghz G4 Powerbook) and it doesn't fit in well with the rest of the operating system. Also the Powerpoint clone doesn't actually work properly as I was unable to get it to run the slideshow full screen, which makes it effectively useless for anything other than composing presentations.

I use OpenOffice all the time on Linux, but for my Mac I went out and bought MS Office as I needed Office software. OpenOffice on X11 just doesn't work well enough for it to be any use.

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[J. J. Ramsey]

"Is there any major drawback to running OpenOffice as an X11 application rather than a native one?"

IMHO, the biggest drawback is that the fonts are awful. The antialiasing in OpenOffice X11 isn't too wonderful.

Pity Apple didn't compile in the TrueType bytecode interpreter into the FreeType library bundled with X11. Then OpenOffice could leave the antialiasing turned off, and the fonts would be readily readable.

there's always Ragtime solo..

[Wire3117]

http://www.ragtime-online.com/ it beats Openoffice hands down. just my ,02

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[Yaztromo]

Forgive my ignorance, but doesn't OS X include an X11 server?

Ignorance forgiven :).

Mac OS X Panther (10.3) does indeed come with an X11 server. However, there are two caveats to this:

• It isn't installed by default, so if the user didn't select it for installation, it won't be on their system,
• Apple doesn't include the X11 server on systems with OS X preloaded (which is all of them). (It is included on the CDs/DVDs you get with the system, however),
• Installation of X11 after OS X is installed typically requires the user to reboot their system with their OS X install disc, and then install the X11 support atop their existing OS X installation.

Not a major problem for power users who need X11 support (this was virtually the first thing I did when I took posession of my first PowerBook last year), but hardly something you can expect your average user to do.

Is there any major drawback to running OpenOffice as an X11 application rather than a native one?

Yes, there are multitudes of such problems, including:

• Unlike every other OS X application, OOo has an in-frame menu bar, and doesn't use the system menu bar (perhaps worse, as X11 does provide a menu bar, you wind up with two menu bars that have some duplication -- for example, both the X11 server and OOo's frame have an "Edit" menu, which can be confusing to a user),
• The installation and program launching routine isn't terribly user friendly,
• Apple's excellent font subsystem isn't integrated into OOo, thus you don't get good anti-aliases text,
• No Aqua look and feel -- everything in it looks quite a bit different from every other application. No nice Aqua scroll bars, for example. Or list boxes. Or other standard controls.
• No desktop integration. The icon in the title bar can't be dragged (in most OS X apps, the icon in the title bar actually represents the document or data being worked on, and you can drag and drop it as if it were the applications icon in the finder, allowing you to do stuff such as e-mail a document by dragging it's title bar icon and droppinng it into the Mail applications icon in the Dock), no text drag-and-drop with the rest of the system, can't use any of the Mac OS X services (like summarization, or text-to-speech), etc.
• Doesn't even use the standard OS X mouse pointers. Even the plain old black arrow pointer is different as soon as you mouse over OOo,
• Doesn't use the standard OS X printing subsystem controls (which is too bad, as the standard OS X print dialog makes it easy to print, fax, or save to PDF all within a single dialog),
• In fact, all of the dialogs are non-standard. File load/save dialogs are another area where this is readily apparant.

That's just a sampling of issues off the top of my head.

The one thing they did at least do was to integrate OOo with OS X's clipboard support directly, making cut and paste between applications work as expected. But that appears to be the extent of OS X support.

I'm rather disappointed in the attitude of OOo in this regard, because OS X really should have a native port of OpenOffice. The only way OpenOffice can take on Microsoft is to not only build a better office suite, but to make sure it's available virtually everywhere in versions that integrate well with whatever operating system it's being used on.

Anyone other than me remember when StarOffice's target operating system was IBM's OS/2?

Yaz.

Too bad.

[ThousandStars]

I'm sorry (but not surprised) to hear the formal announcement. It's particularly strange to see so soon after I wrote this [slashdot.org] post on /. alluding to the technical challenges. Anyway, if you want to see the larger reasons why the port isn't going to happen, look at Patrick Luby's post here [openoffice.org]. The highlights:

2. Event handling, fonts, and printing will take up most of your time Most of the postings that I have seen about Aquafication refer seem to focus solely on getting Aqua widgets on the screen. In other words, everyone gravitates to the "sexy" engineering work. Surprisingly, this is not the hard engineering work. The really hard engineering work is getting all the tedious details of event handling, font layout and rendering, and printing implemented correct. Essentially, VCL is a full-featured cross-platform GUI framework (similar to QT, Java AWT, etc.) so you need to reimplement almost all of that framework before OOo becomes even reasonably stable. When I first NeoOffice/J, getting native windows, buttons, lines, etc. to draw on the screen was finished rather quickly. But implementation slowed to a crawl when I implemented event handling and font rendering. Why? Because the native event handling and font rendering behavior is wildly different on Mac OS X than it is on X11 but your VCL framework implementation must ensure that this different behavior is properly mapped to VCL's platform independent behavior.

I looked at OOo with the thought of helping out with the native port, but recoiled when I actually looked at ths sheer size and complexity and skill necessary. Another important point in the linked post is that moving to Aqua will take "a couple thousand hours of developer time," which I actually think is being optimistic. Unless an experienced somebody or, more likely, team of sombodies is willing to put their nose to the project 40 hours a week, like it's a full time job, it's not going to happen. And even if it does happen, it will break compatibility with the rest of OOo.

OOo, I'm sorry to see you go. At this point it might be easier to start from AbiWord [abisource.com] and move out to develop a full office suite on the Mac. The tension between being "Mac-like" and coordination with the rest of OOo -- which isn't anywhere near as mature as MSO, yet, anyway -- is too great.

Not a big deal

[admiralfrijole]

Contrary to what Slashdot headline and article writers would have you believe, this isn't that big of a deal people.

First of all, we have some nice, juicy, out of context quotes like this one:
no MacOS X work has been done since 2003
when in fact the page linked to states:
all engineering for OpenOffice.org Mac OS X has been focused on X11 graphics, that is, OpenOffice.org Mac OS X (X11).

Then, faithful Slashdot reader, we are informed that: there are no longer any plans for an Aqua version 'due to various licensing, political, and fundamental engineering difficulties'. :(
When in fact, although there will not be an official OOo in Aqua, there is this:
For the last year and a half all engineering work focusing on a native Mac OS X OpenOffice.org version has been concentrated in the NeoOffice/J project, using a combination of Java and Carbon technologies to replace X11.
So you can just use NeoOffice/J

So basically what we have are a group of developers not willing to take the time and effort to go headlong into learning a specific OS's nuances and tweaks, and majority reworking the code to run natively in OS X, but who will keep making an X11 version that keeps up with the other platforms, and there is a 2nd set of developers working that into a native port. Doesn't seem like the end of the world to me.

So have no fear, OOo is here to stay on OS X, and NeoOffice/J is here to work on a native port.

X11 not a default install for OS X

[pbooktebo]

One problem with this is that X11 is not installed by default in Panther. You have to choose "Customize" and then click on X11. As most people don't know what it is for, most will not install it. This, more than perhaps anything else, is a hurdle for basic Mac users.

I really was hoping for an Aqua port that worked well. X11 is just a bit of a pain for those who thrive on Apple's consistent UI.

iWork looks nice (I played with it more than a bit at MacWorld this week), but I would prefer OO in Aqua (Pages, to me, seems more of a page layout tool than simple text editor that replaces Word).

In short, there's still plenty of options (even TextEdit is a fine basic editor), but I had really been hoping this would come through. Let's hope that things may change and a port comes through in the next few years.

Re:good Mod parent down

[aristotle-dude]

Even though you are trolling, I'm going to attempt to educate you a bit about Apple's relationship with open source.

http://www.apple.com/opensource/ [apple.com]

How do you like the contributions to KHTML that Apple provided? What about the PPC additions to GCC?

They are fully compliant with the licenses of the software they use and modify. Did they have to give the Streaming Server to Open Source? No. Did they have to open source Rendezvous? No.

Re:Bad for apple

[redmoss]

Check out NeoOffice [neooffice.org]. They seem to be doing just fine. Help/funds from Apple would certainly not hurt, but I'd say the "native-looking" OS X oo.o version is here to stay.

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[Grant_Watson]

Sorry, but X11 is something which should have died a quiet death circa 1994. Even with the newer WMs you can still spot an X11 app a mile away (although to be fair, that has a lot to do with all the crap GUIs designed for unix apps...I'm looking at you, Gimp.)

Um... X11 is the underlying technology. I don't have any real Unix GUI experience, so somebody correct me if/when I'm wrong: X11 has no concept of a button. Buttons, text boxes, list boxes and other "widgets" are drawn by a toolkit. GTK is used for Gnome and its stuff; Qt is used for KDE and its stuff.

The programs you are talking about just use old-fashioned toolkits. For a better explanation [visi.com], look at the above link by a guy with a really spiffy first name.

One other thing

[ThousandStars]

I hate to reply to my own post, but the other thing to keep in mind is that license politics played some role too, which didn't help. See this post [openoffice.org] in the OOo mailing list. I'm speaking specifically of these paragraphs:

I thought that, apart from bug-fixing the 1.1.x effort, we would get together with the 2.0 tree, and start adding the Aqua gui on the basis what Ed and Patrick have done and learned. Now that Ed and Patrick have problems with the license that is imposed, that does not change most of this arrangement. Only their Gui-code would reside outside the official OpenOffice tree. NeoOffice imports the complete OpenOffice tree, and builds on top of that.

So there could be as many as three OS X versions -- NeoOffice/J, X11 and "native." With different license possibilities for each. It gives me a headache just trying to keep it straight on paper, let alone trying to somehow coordinate all three of these efforts.

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[gallir]

OOo ugly in Linux?

It's as "ugly" as in windows. And much faster.

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[bob beta]

I guess everybody's just too busy constantly recompiling their Linux packages from source to mess with an OS X port.

Why would Linux users care one iota about an OS they don't use??? Do you contribute time and effort into Linux projects?

Re:What is X11 vs. native vs. NeoOffice.org???

[HeelToe]

See some of the earlier posts, but in general:

It's a hassle to use X11 under Mac because you must start up X11 and then OOo. Additionally, the menus do not behave as other Mac menus do, and the integration to the rest of the desktop isn't perfect.

Aqua is the name for the most current display widgets for Mac OS X. Quartz is the video display technology they're built upon. A native Aqua/Quartz application uses the Mac OS X desktop natively, without going through an X11 server that sits as an intermediate.

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[Alrescha]

"Installation of X11 after OS X is installed typically requires the user to reboot their system with their OS X install disc, and then install the X11 support atop their existing OS X installation."

It's a nit, but I think that 'typically', installing X11 involves putting in CD 3 and double-clicking on the X11 package. You make it sound pretty ugly when it isn't.

A.

Re:So? Use Neooffice

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to see a version of OpenOffice using native Aqua and Quartz.

Uh, I think you mean "cocoa"? NeoOffice/J does use actual real-life Aqua (the apple blue-button interface) and runs using Quarts (the apple display compositing system).

Java is only used to facilitate this. The program is not written in java. It's 99% C/C++.

Wrong - signed OpenOffice.org developer

[oo_waratah]

Firstly the anouncement is purely for the Version 2.0 codeline. This is an excellent idea because it focusses everyones attention on getting the best Mac Port possible in the timeframe, not scattering resources trying many things.

The Mac effort is one of the most intense efforts in OOo today by FOSS developers. There are many volunteers and almost daily offers for additional help. So as they say, news of my (OOo) death is premature.

Ultimately the NEO office port will be merged with the mainline OOo. At this stage there are some issues with doing this cleanly so it is managed (extremely well) by a third party. This will continue until the whole thing becomes clean enough to merge. Try NEO if that works for you that is still a win for OOo in my book, I do not care about the brand name frankly my effort in making OOo better in a number of small ways is paying off, I am proud.

Finally do not forget that this is an Open Source development. Any predictions that something will not happen are just very unlikely because someone with a bee in his or her bonnet will do what you do not expect. If you want an Aqua port more you want a serious stable Office Suite using X on Mac then please by all means, do that.

Re:Because QT looks like ass on Mac

[Brandybuck]

I've got a Qt app I distribute for Mac. It looks native because it *IS* native. It uses the native Qt/Aqua. The widgets are genuine Aqua widgets because Qt uses Aqua to draw them. The menu bar is placed at the top of the screen. The configuration menu was moved as appropriate. Etc, etc, etc. With a few carefully placed #ifdefs and a properly constructed icon and application bundle, no one can tell it's really developed under FreeBSD.

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[Angostura]

Moreover X11 is an optional item (default=no) when you initially install the OS. My guess would be that the large majority of Mac users don't have it installed.

Programmer who wrote this story is ED from Neo/J!

[Anonymous Coward]

There ARE still plans to do OpenOffice.org 2.0 in Aqua. It's just going to be done as NeoOffice/J and not as an official OpenOffice.org port. Which is fine because the people who WERE working on the official OO.o port are now working on NeoOffice/J.

So it's the same thing. The guy who wrote that recent post on OO.o linked in the article *IS* one of the two main NeoOffice/J programmers.

This is a pretty misleading story headline.

Re:What is X11 vs. native vs. NeoOffice.org???

[curne]

Everything parent says is absolutely correct, just apart from one little thing. MacOS X automatically starts X11 [macosxhints.com] when you run an X application. The launcher does this by looking at the libraries that the app links to.

I use several X11 app under OSX and it functions great. However, native Aqua apps are generally easier on the eye.

Re:WiApple now getting into the office suite arena

[Guy Harris]

I haven't seen any indication of iWork's MS office compatibility, have you?

Yes - the Compatibility page for Pages [apple.com] says

Simply Opens AppleWorks and Word Files

In fact, here's how easy it is to open an AppleWorks or Word document in Pages: find the document you'd like to open and drag it onto the icon for Pages in the dock or on your hard drive. If you already have Pages running, you could also simply pull down the File menu and choose Open. The dialog lists AppleWorks, Word, Text Edit and documents saved in Rich Text Format (RTF), making it, once again, easy to select and open them. And, by the way, those Word and RTF documents could be PC documents. Pages doesn't care.

How will they look when you open them? Just like they did in your other word processor. Wherever possible, Pages preserves virtually all of the formatting they had. What's more, if you assigned styles in a Microsoft Word document, Pages will import them right along with the text. Now that's compatibility.

and the Compatibility page for Keynote 2 [apple.com] has a table showing that it can read and write PowerPoint presentations.

Nothing about Excel spreadsheets, but given that iWork doesn't have a spreadsheet....

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[poemofatic]

--Open Office uses a FIPS approved RNG to model their font kerning code. Seriously, though, t he f ont l oo ks l i keth is

(well only a little better.) Certainly unusable for any professional settting.

--There is no cut and paste. Well, there is *some* cutandpa
ste of plaint ext char act
tht suffers fr
om the problms shown her e

--No native font support. Fine, I guess until you
*end up with a thousand useless .ttf and type 1 fonts on your system
*cannot use the corporate fonts provided by your employer.

--unstable. And yes, I mean it crashes spontaneously, and yes I've filed bugs, and yes nothing was done about any of them. For example, if you delete a data source (even a text data source) it will crash openoffice and this has been true since version 1.0.2 and no one gives a shit.

--a big mess. By, "a big mess" I mean the code base is shit ugly, with windows and solaris PPC specific magic constants everywhere throughout the code. The code just isn't portable, and getting it to even compile on a mac is an achievement requiring hundreds of hours of developer time. At that point, the OOo team says "done!" and ships the code. This is relevant because porting resources are siphonned off to fighting with the developer practices, and this will cause the mac code to suck for a long long time to come. By far the number 1 thing SUN can do is to enforce some clean portable developer practices. This will shave years off of the mac (and freebsd, and Linux PPC, and IRIX) ports.

--Printing support doesn't work. There are some hacks for a generic (not type 42) printer, but the functionality is mostly broken. Apple has an excellent Gimp-print subsystem that these guys can't wrap their solaris specific magic constants around.

--Pdf generation is ugly and slow, producing poorly kerned, misaligned, sometimes incorrectly rendered text (attempting to pdf custom RGB colors often results in the colors randomly appearing and not appearing in the text.)

--You need to be a font/Gimp print expert to customize the thing to work at all. Not very mac friendly.

--ODBC and JDBC are both painfully broken. It seems that the crashes occur in the display code somewhere, although no one has bothered to debug any of this.

This is not true of the excellent windows port, which Just Works and can be installed by, uh, normal office users.

Re:Heh

[.com b4 .storm]

Yes, but the disappointing thing here is that the primary OpenOffice developers have officially washed their hands of Aqua support, not that they ever cared much for it anyway. That's where most of the development muscle and money is, in the main OpenOffice project. NeoOffice is only being done by a couple of people, and because it is not really an official project, it is always a step behind. They will constantly have to pick up the pieces every time a new release comes out and breaks something in NeoOffice. It's like how Wine tries to make Windows apps fit into Linux - it'll never be perfect, because it's a moving target.

Don't get me wrong, NeoOffice is an amazing project and it works extremely well, especially given the limited number of developers behind it. I remember one of the NeoOffice folks posted before that OpenOffice 2.0 was supposed to be a total redesign that would take into consideration the model of Aqua/Cocoa apps, to make porting easier. Apparently that idea was nixed, hence the official plans for support being dropped. Now the NeoOffice people will be stuck with trying to fit the square peg of OO2 into the round hole of Aqua, as they've been trying to do with the 1.x series. What was originally a temporary and experimental project has now become the only hope for decent OpenOffice on the Mac.

Ah well... No offense to NeoOffice or OpenOffice, but I will be grabbing a copy of iWork soon, so I won't have to worry about it much except when I have one of those (very rare) needs for a spreadsheet. :)

Re:Maybe Apple doesn't care!

[shawnce]

Just because the didn't pick your pet horse...

It's kinda like expecting really good support from Apple for Mozilla when they'd rather push Safari

You do know that Safari is built using KHTML & KJS (both part of KDE) and Apple is supporting them by feeding back bug fixes, enhancements and optimizations.

Also they have made those frameworks available to other developers, outside of Safari, on Mac OS X by bundling them with the OS distribution.

WebCore [apple.com]

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[Bulln-Bulln]

Other than it's slower and looks like total crap?

I those were the only problems, I would be glad.
Unforunately the are bigger problems. I can't paste text from Firefox into OpenOffice, because there's no common clipboard between X11 and Aqua. May it would work if I used the X11 version from Firefox...
I also can't drop a text file onto OO's icon to open the file, because OO has no icon! There's just the X11 icon from the X-Server.
OO's shortcuts use the Ctrl key instead of the Cmd key.

At least NeoOffice/J supports the clipboard, Cmd shortcuts, and D&D on the icon. With customized toolbar icons, Neo/J also looks OK (it's not a nice fully Aqua look, but better than that ugly Win95 look).

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[Yaztromo]

Which may be the point but that doesn't mean you have to make the same sort of application as Office. Why does an Office-suite have to look, feel and act like Office?

When I worked for IBM I, as a developer, got to sit on the other side of the one-way mirror during end-user UI/HCI testing from time to time. And believe me when I tell you that people want products to work and act like what they're already used to, regardless of whether or not what they're used to is completely optimal.

This is the same reason why Gnome and KDE are often chasing a Windows-like design philosophy. They want to give people something they'll feel comfortable switching to.

Is this ideal? Certainly not. But HCI R&D is rife with products that tried to create an easier way to accomplish something, succeeded, and bombed in the industry because it wasn't what people were used to (I'd personally hold up OS/2's WorkPlace Shell as such a product -- IMO the WPS is one of the biggest successes of HCI research in the last 20 years, and we all know how much good that did OS/2 in the long run).

I don't like it one bit -- I prefer software that doesn't just try to emulate the market leader, but which actually tries to innovate in UI and HCI design (one of the reasons why I switched from OS/2 to OS X for my primary desktop system). But I'm unfortunately in the minority.

Do you know people that are happy with Office? I don't know any.

Yes, I'm sorry to say that I do. I know people who absolutely swear by it, and think that trying to compete against it is pointless. If you go outside technical circles, there are a LOT of these people out there. Are they right? Of course not -- but that doesn't mean we can deny that they exist :).

Yaz.

Re:AbiWord's new port

[Anonymous Coward]

Current Abiword on OS X 10.3 is excellent.

Recommended
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ abiword/AbiWord -2.2.2.dmg?download

Re:Eh, no big deal

[Guy Harris]

Seriously, a lot of people are under the misconception that Aqua is a set of nifty-looking widgets. It's an interface standard for clean apps.

The Apple Human Interface Guidelines [apple.com], to be precise.

I don't know whether all the issues you mention are described there, though - I didn't see anything that addressed the number of toolbar buttons, but it does give other recommendations for toolbars, so if by "a row of 20 NSButtons" you mean "something just using a row of NSButtons rather than using NSToolbar", doing the latter might give you toolbar behavior suggested in the Human Interface Guidelines that you wouldn't get with a row of NSButtons.

Now, the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines 2.0 [gnome.org] does recommend not having too much in your toolbar in the section on toolbars [gnome.org]:

Guidelines

• Place only the most commonly-used application functions on your toolbars. Don't just add buttons for every menu item.

The KDE User Interface Guidelines [kde.org] doesn't say anything about keeping the number of toolbar items down in its section on toolbars [kde.org] - in fact, it gives a list of items that should be in the toolbar if you have them in menus, so it might recommend increasing the number of toolbar items. (I think NSToolbar might give you a toolbar that can be customized, so you can have a set of buttons that the user could add to the toolbar if they wanted to, without having them in the default toolbar; the user can also remove items from a customizable toolbar.)

To add one more online HIG to the collection, the Windows Official Guidelines for User Interface Developers and Designers [microsoft.com] doesn't recommend, in its section on toolbars [microsoft.com], that you keep the toolbar from being too cluttered, and its examples do have a number of buttons; it does recommend that you let the user configure it, at least.

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[tverbeek]

This should've been OpenOffice's strategy from day 1.

The problem is that "day 1" for OpenOffice was the day Sun handed them a huge codebase specifically written for X11 and Win32. No Mac API support included.

By contrast, Mozilla was given an app that had already been coded for Mac, so on "day 1" the porting project was already complete. Then with Firefox, they started pretty much from scratch, so on "day 1" they were actually at square 1, and had the liberty of taking cross-platform support into account.

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

This is a serious question: Why is [having all of your programs look and act basically the same] important? I've been using computers from twenty years and have never used an interface which is consistent across all applications. What am I missing?

You're missing the fact that most users aren't as familiar with their computers as you or I might be. To a more casual user, the more consistent the interface, the easier the learning curve and the more productive the tool.

One big reason that Windows took off in mainstream PC use was that it provided standard UI conventions: loading and saving files were done with the same commands on the same menus; clipboard use was consistent across applications (and later even between them); there were common ideas for menus, icons, toolbars, status bars, use of the mouse, keyboard shortcuts, etc.

The Mac is the same, with its own conventions, except that Apple have always had better UI people than Microsoft. Throwing in an OSS app that (like most OSS apps) is rather deficient in the usability stakes just isn't going to win users over when they've got much more polished products available to use instead, no matter how little it costs to buy or how community-centric the attached philosophy may be.

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[snilloc]

macros too.

In addition to the work of getting OOo installed, I would need to re-record all my macros. I'm not about to do that when they work just fine on Excel97, which I have no forseeable plans to upgrade.

For me, it's a lot of work just for "philosophy".

Re:Oh noes!

[MikeFM]

Uhh Firefox, Thunderbird, etc is written using that engine. It isn't just an HTML engine. It's a general UI API that portable apps can be written in using common tools like HTML, CSS, Javascript, XML, etc. Why not port OpenOffice to that platform.

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[whorfin]

If the mac users are really that picky about the UI why don't they pay for the development of a mac version of OO or lobby apple for a real office suite or just say fuck it and buy msoffice?

They are doing exactly what you're so eloquently suggesting.

MS Office is a top selling OSX application [compusa.com] (likely *the* top selling app), and Apple has just announced their iWork suite [apple.com].

NeoOffice/J

[cks3]

Sure, it is java, but NeoOffice/J is a pretty nice non-X11 dependent OS X port of OOo, complete with an aquafied menu, and continued development. Check it out: http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php [planamesa.com]

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[idlerich]

Actually Abiword does have a Mac OS X version, and it's very nice. You can also get TeXShop for the Mac, which is great for those of us who prefer to use LaTeX rather than word processor. So frankly who needs OO.

get your facts straight

[idlake]

First, X11 on OS X is slow; that's not X11's fault, it's a problem with the X11 implementation on OS X. In fact, run natively, X11 is much faster and less memory intensive than Quartz on the same hardware. Second, as for "ugly", that's a matter of opinion. People shouldn't take the FUD of Macintosh zealots like you as a fact, they should look for themselves.

At this point, Gnome and KDE are probably better desktops than Aqua: better integrated, more consistent, more efficient on comparable hardware, and better looking. And it's only getting better with X.org.

Don't believe the Macintosh marketing FUD: Gnome and KDE are excellent desktops.

Re:What's the downside to using X11?

[mrchaotica]

Yeah, right.

If that's the case, then how is it that I'm reading this on a Mac with ZERO non-free applications, aside from the ones that came with the computer (iLife '04, AppleWorks, etc)? (Oh, and zero "pirated" applications" too.)

On my Mac, I've got AbiWord, America's Army, BitTorrent, Blender, Butler, Camino, Cenon, Desktop Manager, DivX, Fire, Firefox, Frozen Bubble, Gimp, Handbrake, Limewire, LyX, MPlayer, Nethack, Nvu, OpenOffice (yes, the X11 version -- I don't like using it, though), OSXPlanet, Quinn, Seti@Home, StepMania, TexShop, Thunderbird, VLC, and Waste. And I also use Fink. Is that enough tolerance and flexibility for you?!

Except for Gimp and OpenOffice (Fink doesn't count), all of these programs are native Aqua apps. If it's worth it to them -- even Nethack, for crying out loud! -- to make native Aqua ports, shouldn't it be worth it for OpenOffice?