Aqua OpenOffice.org v2.0 Cancelled 689
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'. :("
X11 Aqua? (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, I have yet to hear one negative comment regarding Aqua interfaces (done right). This comment appears to be nothing but pure FUD. If anything, an Aqua UI would make an OOo suite EASIER to use on an OS X system.
But, again, whatever. I can't wait to get ahold of Pages. Apple seems to have finally woken up and realized they need their own (updated) office/productivity suite. OOo is great and all, but if their team seems to have the attitude "one platform, one UI" is better, I'll pass.
Besides, there's always NeoOffice/J to root for!
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:1, Insightful)
Other than it's slower and looks like total crap?
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.)
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:3, Insightful)
This news is really a pity.
iWork Killed It (Score:2, Insightful)
p
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:5, Insightful)
- Most people don't have X11 installed - it's optional.
- It doesn't have the key combos people are used to.
- It may never be made to *look* native if it remains X11-only.
- Menubar is in the "wrong" place for a Mac app.
- It doesn't have a standard Dock icon of its own.
Those are the primary issues, and none of them are necessarily deal-breakers for you or me. But they they severely hamper usability for inexperienced users who don't know what X11 is and won't understand why the app looks and behaves the way it does.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it would be like running a windows app on linux and having the whole thing feel like a windows app. Sure, it runs and it is better than nothing, but compared to a true linux app it is awful.
A native (carbonised) OOo would be suitable for giving to people running OSX that ask for a word processor. An X11 OOo is suitable for linux users who also have a mac.
Maybe cause of good work on Neooffice/J ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just a happy Neo Office user who loaded in a bunch of Excel sheets annd got a lot of work done.
Re:Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, what sensationalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, this is OLD news. Anyone who's even remotely followed OpenOffice.org Mac OS X porting work knew any potential Aqua port was on the back burner. Way on the back burner. With the stove unplugged.
Third, the X11 port will ALWAYS continue to exist.
Fourth, there is a Mac OS X graphical port, albeit via Java, in the form of NeoOffice (1 [neooffice.org], 2 [planamesa.com]). This project has come a LONG way since its relatively recent inception, and is an impressive work melding OpenOffice with the Mac OS X look and feel. There's more work to be done, but the latest 1.1 development release is impressive.
Fifth, there are gargantuan technical hurdles to maintaining a full Aqua port of OpenOffice without greater engineering support (perhaps from the likes of Sun, who has shown zero interest in maintaining OpenOffice for Mac OS X, much less maintaining a commercial StarOffice for Mac OS X). These are all detailed here [openoffice.org], incidentally by one of NeoOffice's chief representatives.
So calm down. This isn't an Apple conspiracy, or the end of OpenOffice for Mac OS X. OpenOffice will continue, in X11 form AND in the likes of things such as NeoOffice. If anyone is to blame for the official OpenOffice.org Aqua port going by the wayside, frankly, it's a lot closer to Sun than anyone else.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:3, Insightful)
I feel I just have to say it..... (Score:1, Insightful)
"But C is portable, why are they having portability problems when C is sooooooo portable? Thank god they didn't do it in Java, because java isn't really portable, not like C, and it'd be slow if it was in java, even slower than it's already glacial performance, and it might use lots of RAM, more than that 100 MB it uses now. It'd also slow downt he probject, because C is easier to write than Java, everybody knows C, but there aren't any CS departments that base their courses on Java, who cares about java...."
Seriously, we really need a suite of JAVA tools, like word processors, spreadsheets, web browsers, etc... No more of this "well, it works on Windows, if you want it on Linux or Mac though we'll have to sit down and write it all over again, and probably introduce a ton of bugs....." stuff.
What good is a program that depends on exact versions of 50 libraries (yeah, like I'll be able to reinstall that in 5 years and have even an outside shot at it working) and only works on a couple platforms, if you're lucky. Portability isn't an advantage, it's a requirement. If you're portable spatially (to different platforms) today, then you'll probably be portable temporally (to different time periods) tomorrow. If you can't even get it to run on most of the platforms that exist TODAY, then what makes you think it'll run on the newfangled computer that is going to come out 5 years from now? You've just given you work a lifespan of only a couple years, why would you do such a thing. I know I don't get up in the morning and say to myself "I think I'll do something excruciatingly difficult, and I'll do it in such a way that I'm guaranteed to have to come back and do it again in a couple of years".
Let the C loving rants begin. I'm sure there will be several responders who say "But C is portable and fast" utterly ignoring the ponderous quantity (OOO, Mozilla, virtually every game ever made, etc..) of evidence indicating that the difficulty faced in porting is immense, and when you make your own custom hacked windowing system to speed the process (Mozilla), it ends up being a slow RAM hog, even more so than it would be if it was written in JAVA, or another portable language to begin with.
I really just wish lots more programmers would grow up, then there'd be more good toys to play with.
This is why Open Source projects fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Because QT looks like ass on Mac (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh noes! (Score:3, Insightful)
On a 1.2 GHz G4 with plenty of RAM, it's noticeably slower to start than any other app, including the dominant commercial office suite, and things like cutting and pasting between applications don't work. Add to that, unfamiliarity of the interface and poor interoperability with the file formats your clients and partners are using (can you say microsoft monopoly?) and it's not worth the trouble.
Unfortunate, because, like it or not, OSX is a significant unix desktop userbase. I tried and failed to migrate a mac-centric client to open office, so I know from experience that users mostly just want to meet their deadlines. They don't care what the boss is spending for software, they don't care about vendor lockin, they don't care about philosophy, they don't even care much about stability. They care about ease-of-use (usually meaning familiarity) and interoperability.
no native port = bad experienc (Score:3, Insightful)
So bad where these hoops that i've pretty much tossed OO (using X11) and am using NeoOfficeJ [planamesa.com] with fairly good success.
If the OO team wants Mac users to migrate from MS Office to OO it would probably be smart to focus some time and energy on a native port. Very few people are willing to take all the necessary steps to get OO running on OS X with X11. not only that but it's slow, doesn't have nearly as nice an interface, and DRINKS DOWN the memory.
Dumb mistake in the Mac market (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask Microsoft how well Word would be accepted if it didn't follow the basic UI outlines of the Mac OS. There used to be a time when Word (and all Microsoft products) made up their own key combos, their own look and feel and were generally willy nilly -- a lot like many X11 offerings now. Word was the same on Windows (albeit 3.11) and Mac (6 or 7) but it didn't play well with the other programs.
As a tech support, do you think you'd get more questions from people about why copy and paste doesn't use the same buttons on the Mac/PC/Linux versions or do you think users are more likely to not understand this one program that doesn't act anything like the other Mac programs? How many users are going to hop from machine to machine versus program to program? And then consider that it is just a word processor. Screw it. I wouldn't want those support calls.
This has been the downfall of many otherwise fine pieces of software on the Mac OS. It's users expect consistancy.
Re:I feel I just have to say it..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously, this is not a C portability issue. It's an issue with proprietary GUI APIs.
If it used some standard GUI abstraction layer, it would have been a simple port (as seen with the X11 version, which was easily ported to MacOS+X11 -- how's that for C portability?). But, the port to a different GUI would take much more effort. Unfortunately, the developer resources just aren't there for a native UI port (most of the relevant developers gravitated over to the MacOS X only, Java based, NeoOfficeJ instead).
Re:WiApple now getting into the office suite arena (Score:1, Insightful)
I like Apple stuff too, but this is just stupid rapid fanboyism.
1) Do you have iWork yet? Can you say what about it makes it "superior"
2) What part of the "superior" iWork replaces the spreadsheet functionality of OpenOffice.org?
Undoubtedly, the iWork stuff is going to fit in with the Mac "experience" flawlessly, but to say that there is no value to OOo now is ridiculous. I haven't seen any indication of iWork's MS office compatibility, have you? That tends to be a fairly important part of an office suite these days.
Eh, no big deal (Score:4, Insightful)
If your app has some shitty Office-like toolbar consisting of a row of 20 NSButtons, that's a shitty design. If your app's preferences are organized into 3 rows of 10 tabs each, that's a shitty design. If you can find the same function in 4 different places, that's a shitty design. Doesn't matter if it has an Aqua titlebar and Aqua buttons. Look to Office 2004 as an example of how Aqua cannot save fundamentally bad UI design. The OO.org guys would've just made the same mistake.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:3, Insightful)
2) Slow as heck.
3) Ugly as heck.
Re:I feel I just have to say it..... (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess I"m a bit cynical, as I deal with vendors all day, and they give me the same BS that all the OSS zealots do about native code. I can't tell you how many times we've had a box go down only to find that the sort of hardware/software that can actually run this POS program just doesn't exist anymore. We must have 30 different system configurations at work, I know we've got a few one-offs just specifically to run some native program that a vendor gave us a couple years back.
What happens if one of those one-of-a-kind boxes goes down? Can you get an old US-II running a 3 year old version of solaris with exactly these 50 libraries, and can you get it quickly enough that the company doesn't go out of business before you can bring that thing up? This is probably the single biggest problem with native code, it's HELL to support, but it's even worse if you have to try to integrate with it programatically.
We never have exactly the same compilers/libraries as our stupid vendors, so we can never programatically integrate with thier software, it always gets reduced to passing around files and socket calls, I don't have to tell you what a hoot that is. It's actually possible (and not that hard) to integrate with these things through CORBA, but our sucky vendors usually make that impossible. Even then, it solves the second problem but not the first one.
So, the choice is clear. If we let our vendors give us native code, then we need to plan on having 50 system configurations, and a couple of EXACT duplicate spares of each, as well as dozens of different development environments perfectly suited to each sucky program, or a horrible file based API.
Alternatively we can just require that it's Java or it doesn't get in the door, and then all these problems are gone. If a box goes down, we just replace it with any equivalent hardware and are pretty confident that it'll work. We can also call the APIs directly, as we won't have compiler/library/calling convention mismatches. Even better, if it crashes, we might get a useful stack trace as opposed to merely a core dump and a dead program.
I also must say that the shops that write in JAVA are hugely more cluefull than those that don't. I've worked with and worked at both types, you either understand the above situation, or you don't. You never want to work with or for anybody who can't understand the scenarios layed out above. At work, we are (fortunately) doing a good job of keeping native code out, though there's still a little bit here and there. We are going to add another piece of native code it looks like, but it's either that or buy something from Reuters, and in this case it appears that going native by not-reuters is better than getting anything from Reuters.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:1, Insightful)
I think that was his point.
Re:And there was much... yawning (Score:4, Insightful)
I know of one potentially big one, and that is platform independance.
This may not be big on your list of needs if you're just running OS X at home, but in an enterprise setting where they've standardized on one office suite, but permit different OS's for different purposes, having one suite that can be run on all of them is important.
Or what if you suddenly need to change OS or hardware platforms? It's generally nice to be able to be able to use the same applications, even on a different environment. I know this is why I have Firefox installed on all of my systems, be they Linux, Mac OS X, OS/2, or Windows.
OOo could be a big deal on OS X if it were available in a pure Aqua version (NeoOffice/J notwithstanding). But it isn't, and now it looks like it won't be anytime in the near future.
Yaz.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some have said that the X11 version is "ugly", but the Open Office developers have only themselves to blame for that, there are numerous beautiful graphics toolkits avialable on X11 which wonderful and georgeous user interfaces can be created with. Its not like X11 actually restricts user interface design, in fact, X11 provides a stable, time tested and refined platform which doesnt limit the beautiful user interfaces that you can implement on top of it.
As far as performance, I get excellant performance from X11 on my systems, ussually better than Windows on the same hardware. X11 itself actually does not consume much memory or resources at all on your system. The X Server core consumes under 3 MB (this is around the executable size of the Xnest server which includes just the Xserver core, no hardware drivers).
In fact, It wouldnt bother me at all if Open Office was run on Windows using the cygwin X11 servers rather than have a native windows port. And, i do use Windows and Cygwin all the time, I would much rather see developer resources go to adding new features to one X11 open API based port rather than maintaining a bunch of native ports for proprietary closed OS dependant APIs like Windows and Mac. The overall result would be a much better quality product on all operating systems. Such is part of the beauty of the standardised, OS indepedant X11 API, it allows the same GUI work to be used across many platforms.
Re:Need help w/ my Mac (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a fairly recent Mac convert (who still works with x86 boxes), but the Mac has done nothing but continue to impress me with both its speed, and with it's depth (Most of the time, if you're still finding new capabilities with an app after 6 months of usage, it's indicative of a poorly designed GUI. With the Mac, there's just so damn many features/capabilities that they're often not evident to the casual user).
The file copying example you refer to could be many things, from software conflicts, to physical issues with the memory. There's just so many variables, it's not really answerable without more details (not that I'm trying to troubleshoot it... Just pointing out that your complaint can be applied just about any PC, dependant upon circumstances.). My guess is that your slow Mac may be running less than the optimal amount of memory (OSX is much more "memory hungy" than any MS OS).
I know that in my case. my Mac often copies small to medium sized files (less than 40mb) so quickly, I'll have to re-verify that the copy actually took place. And this is on a dual 2ghz Mac, with 512mb ram (which really needs to be upped to 2.5gb ASAP - Speed should increase quite a bit just getting it up to 1gb, as right now I've got a lot of disk swappin' going on).
I'm also unsure as to your Mac experience from your posting, but daily use of my Mac continues to improve my efficiency. You seem to be growing more frustrated with your Mac experience (which begs the question of why you're using it - Toss it my way if you'd like, and I'll put it good use!), whereas increased usage continually reassures me that my Mac was money well spent (and believe you me, it took me awhile to finaly take the plunge and buy me a Mac).
It's all been said before, but features which make the Mac great are many: Fast (contrary to your experiences), well thought out GUI and features, it's incredably easy to get to grips with just about any Mac program, and once you're ready, most apps offer a small ton of features which increases their value/longetivity even further.
Then of course, we have its Unix capabilities, Applescript, built in PHP, Perl, Ruby, Java, and all the dev tools one could ask for. All capable of system programming.
Then there's those programs which which make the Mac stand out so much over its competition: Delicious Monsters Library [delicious-monster.com], the very impressive Platypus [versiontracker.com], and of course the "can't do without" Quicksilver [blacktree.com].
I won't turn into a gloating "Mac Fanboy" here, but the Mac is a power users dream. Its power and efficiency continues to amaze me. I only hope that the MacMini [apple.com] allows "John Q. Public" to experience the joy that is OSX first-hand.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:2, Insightful)
What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh noes! (Score:2, Insightful)
That's just a lame excuse for "We are the mighty Sun, but we don't help those Mac faggots, because Apple is now competing with us in servers. We neither helped those OS/2 idiots when we released the StarOffice 5.2 source. We had the OS/2 sources of StarOffice 5.1, but OS/2 is from IBM and they are competing with us either. We didn't want to release the source of Win32 StarOffice, too, but Windows is too big to ignore."
PS: No, I don't think that Mac or OS/2 user are fags or idiots, but it's my impression that Sun thinks that way.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:5, Insightful)
For better or worse, the success of NeoOffice/J in this regard has to be considered as a factor in the abandonment of OOo/Aqua. In other words, Neo has rendered a native Aqua port unnecessary. That's really what the OOo folks are saying.
Any Mac user who considers the OSX11 version ugly and hard to install (and it is) should download the current Neo 1.1beta and give it a look. It's easy to install, and while still not as pretty as one expects to find in a Mac app, it integrates well enough into the OS X environment (e.g. native pull-down menu, keyboard shortcuts, printing, fonts) that it could "pass" as a native app. It's no Office X, but it's good enough to give to Regular People as a free substitute. I think the only thing it's missing that it really needs is a "look and feel" theme that mimics Aqua instead of MacOS 9, and (like all versions of OOo) more speed.
So now we have two clear choices:
If consistency with the current Win and Lin versions is important to you, use the OSX11 version.
If consistency with other OSX apps and ease of installation is important to you, use NeoOffice/J.
Re:Setback in Establishing PowerPC as Workstation (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides which, NOTHING about OpenOffice or MS Orifice requires ECC or a workstation.
When it comes to engineering documents, a combination of LyX, XCircuit or XFig, and MATLAB beats the shit out of Excel and Word any day of the week. I think I'd quit my job before I tried to write a real, equation-heavy engineering document in Word. LyX just has a better EQ editor hands down. And there's a native OSX version of LyX.
What's needed to establish Macintosh as "the premiere engineering workstation" platform is ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS. PSpice, MathCAD, a decent version of MATLAB, various FEA packages, etc. Vendor support in the form of OSX-native tools (Altera, Microchip, are you listening?). Obviously I'm EE-biased here (being an EE), but I'm sure that the ME, ChE, and CE guys can provide a similar wishlist. How about an OSX version of Autocad? THAT would sell some Dual G5 boxen.
Processor architecture is really irrelevant here. It's the OS that matters. Autodesk, say, can easily recompile a Unix version of Autocad to run on SPARC, AMD64, Xeon, P4, MIPS, or PowerPC once they develop the Unix version . Now, it may not be completely straightforward to turn that into a native Aqua version, but it's gotta be easier than converting the Windows version to Aqua.
Reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
As for their reasoning that an X11 port is better, it is completely flawed. Firefox shows that reason 1 and 2 are bogus as it is to market at the same time on all platforms with equal stability, reason 3 is actually a draw-back that they are trying to market as a feature (gotta love the Microsoft-ian logic there), and the last one is basically a way of stating that we already have an X11 port so it means less work for us. If any of these were valid points, Windows users would be running it in Cygwin right now. They're all just a way of saying "we don't care in the slightest about your platform, but we don't want to look like we don't care." Frankly, if you don't care, that's cool. This is your work. You don't have to support Mac OS X if you don't want to. Anyone is free to come along and pick it up if they are interested. That's what is so great about free software. Just don't trip me and tell me you did it because I looked lonely and you thought I could use a hug from the ground.
More importantly, OOo just isn't that good. It's amazingly slow and ugly, uses a fileformat that takes forever to save and creates huge files, and just plain worse than the other options out there. It's why there haven't been a lot of developers flocking to it from the Mac community. Something like Adium gets developers because it is the best. It's fully native, it's fast and clean, etc. There are a lot of other OSS projects on the Mac as well that are all good projects. OOo, by comparison, seems to employ a pretty terrible codebase and interface. While it has more features than AbiWord, AbiWord is clearly a better base. When you add Mac uses tendency toward well-done software with the fact that Mac users also don't mind paying for software as much as users of other platforms (lets face it, even Windows users don't pay for software - they pirate it), it means that OOo on the Mac doesn't have as much interest.
One of the big problems is that OOo only has the "free" aspect to draw users. WordPerfect Suite and Microsoft Office are still much, much better applications - this is coming from a user whose computer only has Ubuntu on it, not some OSS hater.
I've come down pretty hard on OOo here, but as a long term Mac user and now an Ubuntu user who loves Gnome, OOo is just terrible. Now, if you want the most featured office suite available, OOo is a great option for you. For a user like myself, and most Mac users, the features of OOo don't make up for the bloat and interface. Things like AbiWord and Apple's new Pages are much more attractive options even though they do less. Hopefully, OOo will become better in the future (I've run some of the 2.0 previews and wasn't that happy). Maybe AbiWord and OOo will start to converge toward each other like mySQL and PostgreSQL. But until OOo cleans itself up a lot, there isn't going to be the interest needed to bring it to the Macintosh because of how Mac users like their applications to work.
Re:AbiWord's new port (Score:3, Insightful)
AbiWord was developed with proper MCV abstraction, and has Windows, GTK, Photon (QNX), BeOS (no longer supported) and Aqua (OS X) user interfaces. Because it was sensibly designed, it can easily be ported to other GUI front-ends (I believe the Cocoa port was done by a single person). OpenOffice is a huge heap of crusty code, which needs a huge amount of re-factoring. Version 2 was supposed to provide this, making it easy to add new GUI layers, but this seems not to have happened.
Your app is a great demonstration of my point (Score:4, Insightful)
Merely using Aqua controls is not enough.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree with the hypothesis that "No-one likes Office". I can agree that most people here on /. (myself included) don't like Office, but we're in a minority situation.
I imagine there are lots of people in clerical professions who have gone on two-day courses to get a certificate saying they know how to use Office who rather like it, because they're experts in it. Much like there are people out there who really like Windows because they make a lot of money working in it (regardless of how truly crappy it is).
I can understand why OOo is targeting the Office crowd -- they don't need to target those people who have a need for a word processor every third Sunday -- they're going after those people who are currently using MS Office day-in and day-out, and who expect a competing suite to offer similar features and a similar experience.
My copy of iWork is already on order. I've been wanting to get Keynote for some time now, and getting it bundled with what looks to be a high-quality word processing/page layout solution for less money equals me pre-ordering a copy from Apple's website the same day it was announced :).
Yaz.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:3, Insightful)
But how many users are going to hop from platform to platform using OO, compared to the number who are going to stick to one platform (OS X) and hop from app to app?
Re:Sour grapes (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't blame Mac users if you don't write an application to look like the platform you put it on.
You wouldn't write an Apple IIe-type program for Windows and expect people to think it looked nice.
Why would you expect to write a program for one type of GUI, port it, but keep exactly the same interface, and expect the people on the second platform to think your program works very well?
Programs on different operating systems should not look exactly the same. If you have a program for one OS that looks like it was written for a different OS, you can expect people to see that application as a half-attempt, and you can expect them not to regard the program very highly.
And as for open-source on the Mac OS, most Mac users I know love open-source software. I have nine open-source applications in my dock right now, and numerous others on my system. Most of them have been much more successful than OO.o. I would say that 99% of the problem OO.o has on the Mac is that it doesn't look like other Mac programs and doesn't try to.
Most Mac users don't want to run second-hand programs, and second-hand is exactly the impression OO.o leaves on the Mac.
I was really looking forward to an Aqua port of OO.o.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see what the problem is with integrating native GUI libs with an OSS project. Firefox does this with extreme success on multiple platforms. This should've been OpenOffice's strategy from day 1.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:4, Insightful)
So in short, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with using the X11 version of OOo on Mac OS X, except that it doesn't mesh with the native look and feel, subjectively feels slower than any native Aqua app does, and requires (or at least it used to - it may be integrated into the install process now, haven't checked the OS X builds in ages) separate installation of an X11 server before it will work. These are all completely unacceptable in a mass market office suite.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ahhh, but that's the question. If they really want to be truely multi-platform, then either A: they need to have a UI that is flexible enough to "theme" for different operating systems, B: they need to create GUI shells for different operating systems. What you're talking about right now is having a uni-platform office solution based on X11, which may or may not fulfill either A: or B:.
Given how much Mac users are forced to pay for pretty much everything, they should be grateful that free software is availble.
In some cases, you get what you pay for (great shareware, for example.) In other cases you get great stuff for free (lots of freeware, OS/FS software like Firefox, bundled apps from Apple like Safari.) I don't think Mac users are really hurting for good software, although having a fast, fully-compatible version OO would be great.
Consider that the Windows version of OO is integrated quite well, while the current X11 version of OO for MacOS X isn't that great.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
If not openoffice then maybe koffice or abiword/gnumeric or something.
It just strikes me as being totally arrogant to say "what you gave me for free isn't good enough for me, go back make it so that I am happy and don't expect me to lift a finger or spend a dime either."
Maybe it's time to scratch off the mac as a supported platform for OO.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think this is exactly why OO will never be ported to macosx. The developers know that the mac crowd will not accept OO unless it's better then MS office. The windows and linux oo users are more tolerant and flexible in their expectations. They are willing to use something for free even if it does not work as well as something that costs 400 dollars. Mac users would rather pay the 400 dollars then to use anything that would spoil their mac experience.
I think this is a good decision by the OO guys. It would be really hard to support or live up to the expectations of the typical mac user. It would be a thankless job and it would be very painful.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:4, Insightful)
You probably haven't used the Mac much. Probably the BEST thing about the Mac is the consistency of the UI (enforced by published Human Interface Guidelines) - this has been an advantage since the original 128K machine.
OO.o on OS X stinks- the menus are attached to windows instead of the standard Mac menu bar, Mac fonts aren't available, dialogs don't match the Aqua standard, aliases aren't supported in File Open/Save dialogs, cut and paste are broken, there is no QuickTime or iPhoto or Services or Dock or Keychain or AppleScript support, and the damn thing is S-L-O-W.
For users who came over from Windows/Linux (i.e. the ones who bitch the most about well-established Mac UI conventions) OO.o might be acceptable. For anyone who is used to the Mac's capabilities, it's a POS.
There's a profound lesson which many a developer from Apple and Microsoft on down has discovered vis the Mac market- crap won't fly. Period. Crippling your app so it is limited to "common denominator" features found on other platforms is a sure path to failure.
If the OO.o developers had REALLY been interested in the Mac, they would have supported the above Mac technologies plus new stuff like Spotlight and Automator. This announcement is no real shock nor is it much of a loss for the platform.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's just pure bullshit. OO will do just fine in the corporate market without mac support. Mac support never has been and never will be an obstacle. Like you said it's like 1% of the corporate desktops.
Re:X11 Aqua? (Score:3, Insightful)
Short version:
More people run multiple apps on one platform than run one app on multiple platforms.
Appendix:
Dur.
Re:Eh, no big deal (Score:3, Insightful)
It is either have those buttons in a toolbar somewhere for easy access to common functions or waste time opening the top level menus, or learn obscure shortcut keys.
Look at some other complicated applications, say photoshop. This has a huge number of complicated toolbars. At some point you have to learn what each icon in the toolbar means. And their is no way to get around it.
I have never understood the logic that says having more than one way of doing something is bad UI. It would seem to me to be benificial to finding functions quickly if their is more than one place to find them.
Having multiple tabs in preferences. This kind of design, keeps all preferences in one preferences window, and clearly distinguishes between them by the name on the tab. The other common way is to have Icons in a folder, like the OSX system preferences which has a downside of having to return to the main window to access another preference pane, or something like a firefoz/mozilla style tree with nested preference panels under top level tabs which is probably the best, but can be frustrating at times when you are trying to track down the exact right preference panel if a preference doesn't fit neatly into one of the top level tab definitions.
Re:Apple also has a forth coming Office Suite (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd be very surprised if they don't - but they're focusing on one piece at a time (Keynote, then Pages, then...) and releasing them that way, instead of developing them all at once (spreading resources thin). I'd expect a spreadsheet to be next, then a database - perhaps a front-end to SQLite.
So if it is based on OOo in some way, they did a phenomenal job at fixing it up!
It isn't. It was easier for Apple to start from scratch, than to add a nice UI to OOo. Besides, they'd have to release it as open-source, and they'd rather charge $79.
Re:This is why Open Source projects fail (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry, that's just silly. Nearly all Mac users use Macs because they prefer them to Windows and Linux PCs. That's it. It has nothing to do with worshipping Apple. (Yes, there are the guys that paint Apple logos in their hair. They aren't exactly representative).
as such, no matter how good your open source product and no matter how free it is it can never compete with anything apple.
Counterexamples: Firefox and Camino.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most Mac users do exactly as you suggest, which is use MS Office or some other native Mac alternative.
Saying "I'm giving you this for free, so you better use it even though it doesn't suit your needs." is just as arrogant.
And I say this as someone who is perfectly happy running the X11 version of OO.o on my Macs.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:4, Insightful)
I remeber back when people still bought their office apps separately and Excel was the superior thing.
It was then that microsoft started pushing the office concept with the pricing where you could get the whole office package for about one and half times the excel price, thus people started going for it, though usually word was seen as not so good solution, but a "good enough" one.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, what are these powerful features I'm talking about?
- AppleScript. Do all YOUR [assume you're a Linux user for a minute, please] graphical applications support scripting -- and more importantly, cross-application scripting? Mine do! And I can mix Applescript and Bash script in the same file.
- Services. I can select text in any application and have it spell-checked, read to me, inserted into an email, auto-summarized, etc. I can even apply an Applescript to it.
- The Terminal. I get a pretty GUI, but I get all the UNIXy commmand-line goodness, too.
- Mac apps. I can run *nix and X11 apps just like you can, but I can run Mac apps too, and you can't. There are lots of Mac apps with no real (decent and complete) equivalent on Linux: iTunes, Keynote, commercial games, that bookshelf thingy that there was an article about yesterday, etc. And they've got the je ne sais quoi too. ; )
Oh, and in a few months when Tiger comes out we'll get two biggies:- Spotlight. Not only does it search, but it enables Smart Folders -- now I can set it up so that all my data gets organizes itself, instead of me having to do it manually!
- Automator. I'll be able to create scripts graphically (no worrying about syntax and no having to look up the API).
If all you Linux or Windows people see when you look at OS X is the eye candy, you're missing the point.Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:3, Insightful)
And the really significant part? I don't go to an art school. I go to an engineering school, and it's the Computer Science majors (including me) who are switching!
OpenOffice would do well to cater to the Mac people as well as the Free Software people, because more and more, it's the same group!
Re:Sour grapes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Reality bites (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:More of a problem for Apple than for me (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple should do a Safari (Darwin, Cups, GCC...) here and admit that they can't produce a first rate office suite by themselves.
I strongly disagree. For quite some time I hoped that Apple would pick up the Mozilla source and run with it. Instead they picked up the Konquerer source and ran with it. It was probably a good engineering decision on their part and it resulted in corporate sponsorship for a second open source rendering engine. This helps open standards and keeps web developers from writing gecko specific code to go with their IE specific code.
I've used open office, and a huge number of other word processors, and layout programs. There is huge room for improvement over either OpenOffice or Word. I'd like to see some of the best features of Word, OpenOffice, Indesign, and Framemaker all put together with some top notch usability. I don't think Pages will be there in it's first iteration, and maybe never. But from what I have seeing it may be a better, and more flexible base than OpenOffice would have been. That is not to say that I don't think support for open formats is not important. They have a good start on compatibility but seem to be lacking support for OpenOffice, Latex, PNG, SVG, and a few others. Also, I hope their native format is XML based, like Keynote. Ideally, they will have a plug-in format so any developers can easily incorporate import/export filters to a given format.
Basically what I am saying is that while I appreciate OpenOffice, I'd much rather see a system designed right from the ground up, rather than another Word clone, regardless of the quality.
Re:AppleScript versus Unix world (Score:3, Insightful)
Fundamentally, I agree with you. I like it when I have small utilitues that do small things very well. I've burned a lot of CD's using cdrecord, for example. (Mainly to make boot CD's for my dreamcast - I have yet to find a slick integrated monolithic GUI app that makes developing boot CD's for obscure platforms a convenient thing...)
Now, let us ponder for a moment... Not everything is done best by small command line utilities. For example. Let's suppose that you have PowerPoint, or a PowerPoint type clone. It makes sense for it to be a fairly monolithic app. But, it also makes sense to be able to script your presentations.
The Windows way would involve VB. So, no right thinking person need consider the Windows way.
The Linux way would involve exposing as much as possible of the GUI to the command line. Possibly inventing some sort of scripting language. It would sloiw development, because it would require substantial resources to impliment well, and keep current with the GUI, and make all GUI functionality available to the command line API.
The Mac way would, naturally, be AppleScript. The develoiper doesn't need to make a bunch of little utilities to go along with his monolithic app. He doesn't need to maintain an API. Adding Applescript requires a tiny amount of work for a native app. It exposes large amounts of functionality conveniently. In the hypothetical presentation app, it would be trivial to allow the scripts to set a presentation to have as many slides as there are images in a directory, and add text on the slides extracted from EXIF data in the JPEG's, and then overlay some lines and such, and set random transitions between them all.
Sure, you could just use ImageMagik to add text on top of the slides, and add some graphical elements, and save them out as a different set of JPEG's, but if that isn't what you want to do, it doesn't help you. Sometimes you really want to use a monolithic app because it is the right tool for the job, and no amount of chanting UNIX mantras will cause your spplications to change into something else, and more than a Windows user chanting his mantras will turn sed, awk, and teco into a monolithic friendly GUI application.
By having a sane systemwide scripting language, you have the ability to make use of those monolithic GUI apps, and still use the little utilities (in my above example, you would probably use a "classical" command line utility to get the EXIF data to tell the presentation program to put on the slide)
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but what you wrote is nonsense, pure and simple. The combination of Windows, Word and Excel was what put Microsoft where they are today. Back then those tools were so far ahead of the DOS-based word processing and spreadsheet market in usability that almost everyone jumped to Windows to use them. The interoperability of Word and Excel, and the standard user interface of all Windows applications, were two of the major selling points in the promotional material. The fact that Windows made it relatively straightforward for new players to offer their products with similar GUI look and feel helped a lot, too.
The web browser is almost irrelevant to Microsoft's current position. They hardly even noticed the web until the 95 generation, by which time the Windows product line had long since estabished itself as the dominant PC platform.
Re:I'm sorry, but that looks like ass (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe my application isn't a native Mac app, so what? At least I speak Mac well enough to be understood. Maybe I've got a slight accent, so what? I'm covering a market niche that no one else in Mac-land has bothered to cover. Before my Qt/Aqua port all my Mac users had to perform painful contortions with Fink and XFree86. If you think my Qt/Aqua port has an unacceptable accent, you should have seen it when it had a Motif accent!
No, I didn't use XCode. That's because I use Emacs and GCC. Heck, I didn't even know XCode ran under FreeBSD. In any case, I could have redone my interface to make it adhere better to your sensibilities. And I could have done it in Qt/Aqua. But that interface would have been so different from the X11 and Windows interfaces that I would have had to either fork the code, or befoul it with scores of additional #ifdefs (and the resulting illegibility and unmaintainability they cause). I could have done this. But Mac users would have had to wait a lot longer to see the finished product.
I'm not claiming that my application is a perfect example of Mac ideals. I merely claimed that you couldn't tell it wasn't developed natively. Your initial impession that it was a Carbon app validates my point. If I would have spent the extra time to fix some niggling minor "foreign accents" in the interface, I could definitely have made it look as if Steve Jobs himself has written it. And it still would have been written in Qt/Aqua.
But I don't even own a Mac. Which is why I think my porting attempt is pretty damned good. Even if it pisses off elitist French winesellers.