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'. :("
What's the downside to using X11? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So? Use Neooffice (Score:2, Interesting)
WiApple now getting into the office suite arena... (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, I'm willing to pay for superior alternatives.
Qt version (Score:5, Interesting)
It wouldn't provide overly tight integration with the MacOS X user interface, but it would be way better than today's X11-based OpenOffice.
Yes! (Score:1, Interesting)
Seriously, that's bad. I knew that there weren't many people involved in porting it and I expected it to take longer than planed, but I never imagined it would simply be canceled.
Does somebody know what those political and licensing issues were in particultar?
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:5, Interesting)
AbiWord's new port (Score:5, Interesting)
no big loss (Score:5, Interesting)
The x11 port works as well as it does on other platforms, i.e. it's great unless you want ms-office compatibilityl. The OSX port would add eye candy and a more conventional OSX "feel." I suppose it would also support fonts (which mac users have in massive numbers). But would these things be enough to make users switch? I think not.
Folks who want full ms-office compatibility will use ms-office or, perhaps, the upcoming iWork. nd folks who can live with something that is not ms-office compatible (and I stipulate that OO is not) will probably be just as happy to use the existing x11 interface.
Me? For committee work (which demands ms-office compatibility), I'll use ms-office. For presentations I'll use keynote, unless I'm sharing it and therefore using PowerPoint. For my research writing I'll use latex. For my friends I'll use a fountain pen. Hm... OO doesn't fit in anywhere :-(
Re:So? Use Neooffice (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So? Use Neooffice (Score:4, Interesting)
I still prefer to use latex for writeups but when i need to use office, MS office for Mac is pretty damn good. There is a reason why office for mac consistently gets better reviews than its windows counterpart.
Re:I feel I just have to say it..... (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there a good compiler (open source or otherwise, but for the major platforms) that will turn Java into native code without requiring a virtual machine?
I don't see why one shouldn't exist, but I haven't heard much about one.
Re:What is X11 vs. native vs. NeoOffice.org??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Large animals, such as sheep and cattle, are used to convert captured solar energy into a form that humans can use
That's what plants are for buddy.. Large animals then convert the hard earned energy of the plants into useless gasses, heat, sound and a tiny bit of food.
If you want sustainability, get rid of the big animals. In fact get rid of the chickens, too.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:2, Interesting)
Funny, this is a perfect description of what it's like to run OOo on Linux - The installation looks and handles like a Windows app's, the way it integrates into the system is Windows school of thinking and it shows, the installed application looks and feels like a Windows app and finally you can, by default, not use all of the fonts available to all the other X-apps you're usually using....
Has anyone tried hiring a MacOS X developer? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe Apple doesn't care! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's kinda like expecting really good support from Apple for Mozilla when they'd rather push Safari.
hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, as a mac user I am somewhat pissed off that the platform is being relegated to the status of a second-class citizen. OSX X11 takes quite a while to start up, and incurs a NOTICABLE overhead compared to the Windows native version of OpenOffice.
Also, on a platform that makes it name based on simplicity, having to install X11, with its cumbersome (and possibly confusing to users with no *NIX familiarity) configuration choices may drive users away.
On the flip side of this coin, Apple's iWork suite may get a boost from this (OpenOffice will never be native, iWork is native & integrates seamlessly with the rest of the iEverything world), which will help Apple's bottom line - so this isn't all bad.
Still, I was hoping for a native OpenOffice in v 2.0. Cest' la vie.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:1, Interesting)
On java applications (Score:4, Interesting)
ANSI C is very portable. It's also utterly useless for things like GUI applications, unless you feel that writing your own GUI toolkit and low-level system interface is fun. Portability problems are introduced by the system APIs and GUI toolkits used to do interesting things - not by the language.
Java provides a standard GUI toolkit, plus some very good abstractions of platform APIs. If, however, you want to go beyond those platform APIs, you're back at square 1 - re-implementing the platform service, or writing an interface to it to abstract it for cross platform use. Bang! Your Java app just ceased to be portable.
To get the sort of OS integration the mac users rant about, I'd be very surprised if you didn't have to write a few extensions for platform API interfaces.
Another issue with Java is the GUI toolkit. IMO Swing is clunky, ugly, and gives everybody the SAME poor "user experience". Even tools like JEdit that I've seen held up as examples of how well things can work feel pretty painful in my experience when compared to a native app. I'd find Java a lot more interesting if Sun would bite the bullet and put their weight behind SWT.
In the mean time, I'll be sticking to C++ and Qt - IMO the next best thing for portability, and much better when it comes to GUI work. Of course, Qt borrows liberally from the Java APIs where they're good, and I'll for that.
As for Mozilla, I'm pretty sure they implement their own GUI toolkit - not a window system. I'm with you on the slow RAM hog, though.
I'm not one to argue that Java is fast, but IMO until they Sun addresses the Swing albatross Java won't be a viable first choice for implementing serious GUI applications where "user experience" is a major concern.
Re:Too bad. (Score:4, Interesting)
It could be one somebody, but yeah, it's a full-time job - I wrote the original Swing MacLookAndFeel from Apple and if I hadn't started when Swing first came out, long before anyone else thought it was important, it wouldn't have been ready when OS X shipped.
(This was the second MacL&F, actually, but the first one was really only a "look". I had nothing to do with it)
Re:hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Two, don't get pissed at OOo, talk to Apple. If Apple wants other apps to be able to work natively on its platform, they're going to have to open up. I don't see how anyone expects significant work to be done when everything has to be reversed engineered. This is what pisses me off about people who complain about GAIM's lack of options compared to the protocol-native clients for each service (AIM, Yahoo!, ICQ, Jabber, IRC, etc.).
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually I think that path will fail miserably. The path to take is the one I think that Apple is taking. Make sucecssful and compelling apps that provide people with the features they want and make them easy to use and interoperable.
Office apps are typically bloated and infuriating to use. The main reason I don't use OO on any platform is that it tries to mimic the same horrible user experience that Office has.
Why duplicate crappy applications? People aren't that stupid and if you give them useful, functional applications that still do things like read Office files then I am sure they will use them.
No-one likes Office so what is there to lose in trying to duplicate Office formats but with a better app?
I'll be checking out Pages when it comes out but if Keynote is any indication I am sure it will be yet one more reason not to use Office or OO
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:5, Interesting)
Mac people don't want what open-source people think is a good interface. They want consistency and an easy learning curve. This means having all of your programs look and act basically the same. Menus, widgets, the whole shebang. X11 programs on the Mac feel very foreign and difficult by comparison, like they don't belong. Sure, they run just as well as they do on other operating systems, but they are missing a certain je ne sais quoi, which even the best X11 program is not going to have.
An aqua port of OO.o would be very worthwhile. In fact, I think it could be *huge*. Mac users are some of the most anti-Microsoft people around, and don't want to shell out money for Microsoft Office. Having a good open-source office program like OO.o on the Mac would be good for Mac users, OO.o users, and anyone who isn't a fan of Microsoft.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, it couldn't possibly be that porting from X11 on Linux/Solaris to X11 on Mac is much much easier than actually creating an Aqua port.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:3, Interesting)
To borrow a phrase from the English, "Bollocks."
This is precisely one of the things that makes the Macintosh such a great platform. Apple developed UI guidelines, and, for the most part, developers stick to them. I might agree with you if OOo was the norm in Mac applications, but in reality it's a huge exception.
Simply put, OOo will not succeed on the Mac platform if it appears "broken" to the users, which is where things sit with the X11 port.
Re:This is why Open Source projects fail (Score:3, Interesting)
Revenue? nope.
Respect? not from tards like you, I guess
If Apple doesn't want to support X11 properly, with a decent font server and a lack of high-performance extensions, thats their call.
So tell me again what the motivation for volunteers to port to OS X native APIs (which are mostly closed and proprietary) are?
Come on, You have a native MS Office port for your platform, a bunch of other shareware or commercial office suites and surprising as it may be for you, Linux/UNIX users are not all primarily motivated by this ridiculous 'BEAT MICROSOFT AT ALL COSTS' idea.
Just pay for an office suite if you need one that fits criteria that the open alternatives don't meet.
Thats the economic model that Apple's Carbon and Cocoa APIs encourage, so if you want to have a go at someone over it, take it up with Steve Jobs, not the people in the OSS community.
Nobody owes it to you to slave away cutting code for an essentially closed platform that few developers have on their desktops, so you can type out your word processing documents. If it means so much to you, either do it yourself or organise a bunch of people to do it for you.
Its not going to happen just because you post your whinings to Slashdot, thats for sure.
Reality bites (Score:5, Interesting)
I always look at these threads with amazement. How can anyone really believe that a major corporation supports OSS for philosophical reasons? They do it because of basic economics, which they expect to benefit them in the long run. Typically, they are attempting to commoditize software on a particular hardware or OS platform they control, in order to increase the value of their position in that hardware/OS market, or more likely today in related service sectors. It is not surprising at all that Sun won't divert resources to support OSS on a competing platform!
It's also amazing that a few OSS evangelists can still chant the "if you don't like the development direction, you can just fork" mantra and maintain that OSS is future-proof and highly portable on this sort of basis. To an impartial observer, it's obvious that most of the major OSS projects (from Linux on down) are developed principally by a small number of commercial concerns, who have those same reasonable economic drivers for doing it. Unfortunately, it just isn't realistic for a handful of individuals who haven't been involved for a long time to pick up projects on this scale and carry on development. It has never been a good situation in the commercial, closed source world, and just opening the source to everyone (typically laughable documentation and testing included if you're lucky) doesn't make it any more likely that it will happen. Sun apparently understands this, and knows that in reality they still have far more control over StarOffice/OpenOffice development than anyone else, and will therefore use it to their advantage if they're even remotely smart.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:3, Interesting)
Believe it or not, there are people out there that do use some of those funky little features that no other package supports. Don't assume that everyone can get by with an office suite that has a less extensive feature set than the MS product.
Re:Sour grapes (Score:2, Interesting)
The success of iTunes for Windows suggests that this is not universally true. I know some people who avoid it because the interface is weird compared to what they're used to, but there are plenty of people who really don't seem to have any problem running something that looks like a Mac app on their PC.
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's called GNUStep. [gnustep.org]
Porting OpenOffice to Aqua/GNUStep would actually be useful. GNUStep is similar to Java or
More of a problem for Apple than for me (Score:5, Interesting)
But it works, and since we got so fed up with different file formats at home and switched everything to the free OpenOffice XML (OASIS) format, this is what counts here. Those of you who think OpenOffice XML is some isolated open source thing should keep in mind that the European Union (400 million people and counting) is probably going to make OASIS an ISO standard (Sun is pushing this like mad), and that open source projects of all kinds are converging on it as a common standard: Koffice is the biggy next to OpenOffice.org. The standard is here to stay. If you want to play the game, sooner or later you either have to have a monopoly or support it.
Which brings us to the reason why this new announcement is more of a problem for Apple than for the average Slashdot user: The OS X platform does not offer a free full-fledged office suite. AppleWorks is a joke, basically one of those toy apps left over from when they had that toy operating system OS 9, and iWorks is neither a full suite nor does it support OASIS. And there is no way I am going to pay for Microsoft Office, since it does little more than OpenOffice for some ridiculous price. I mean, when it comes down to it we're talking about the choice between buying an iPod or buying Microsoft Office. Duh!
I've said this before and I'll say it again: Apple should do a Safari (Darwin, Cups, GCC...) here and admit that they can't produce a first rate office suite by themselves. Keep Keynote if you must, but get the rest of the people wasting their time with iWorks behind an Aqua OpenOffice port. This would rid Apple of the last area where they are dependent on Microsoft, and give them the office capabilities the Mac currently lacks.
Re:Reality bites (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's the downside to using X11? (Score:3, Interesting)
a troll here, but WTF? The only downside to
using X11 is that the development team isn't
in a toe-to-toe slugfest with whatever the
platform dependent GUI-of-the-day is.
OOo long ago (3+ years) decided that they would
fork OO between platforms instead of using a
common source tree with #IFDEFs to handle
platform dependencies. The argument promulgated
was that separate source trees would make use of
platform dependent GUI standards better. My
argument (at the time) was that a common source
tree would be easier to maintain, and so what if
the application did not look like other apps on
the same platform -- a common look-and-feel
across platforms would establish some measure
of "branding". Well, okay -- so why now drop
the differentiation between platforms that OOo
thought was so necessary (and break the common
source tree maintenence relief)? And especially
only for the Max OSX platform?
What I see is 3+ years of wasting time on
platform differentiation (to compete head-to-head
with MS Office), instead of making the entire
suite slicker and more feature-rich. As it
turns out, anyone trying to stay current with
constantly evolving GUI standards from either
Microsoft or Apple is "chasing their tails".
IMHO, "look-and-feel" can easily be trumped by
top quality rock solid code, and a feature-rich
environment.
Abandoning the platform-dependent GUI on one
platform (OSX), while dancing toe-to-toe with
Microsoft's GUI on the another is the worst of
both worlds. Chasing ghosts does not get the
job done. A feature-rich office apps replacement
that can go anywhere with a simple "./configure"
and "make" has intrinsic value, even if it is
reliant upon X11.
Just my rapidly depreciating $00.02 worth.
Re:The OOo Mac Cancel (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, I went back to using OO.org X11. It's huge, and runs pretty slow, and looks like crap, but it works. The Start OO.org AppleScript launcher, which provides an icon to start OO.org, and also provides support for OO filetypes with icons, is a nice supplement.
After seeing this today, I tried the current version of NeoOffice/J. I didn't realize it was this far along. A real Mac menubar! Aqua print dialogs! Starts up reasonably fast! No X11 required! Compared to OO.org X11, this is already a native port. Yes, it has a little further to go, but my gosh, what a good job for a project with two or three developers.
Great job, guys!