At Long Last, NeoOffice/J 1.1 Released 336
VValdo writes "After nearly five years of development, NeoOffice/J has made it to its first stable release. NeoOffice/J 1.1 is a Mac OS X-integrated office suite based on OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 that includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing applications. Key Macintosh features include a standard Mac OS X installer, a native Aqua menu bar, use of the native printing system, full clipboard support, drag-and-drop, Mac "command" key shortcuts, mouse scrolling, integration with major Mac email clients and native support for Mac fonts. The full announcement is here."
Cached on mirrordot (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/56f602610d944f
Looks like their news page died at 17,000 hits after 12:17 today. Very sad.
Re:What's with the J? (Score:4, Informative)
Valid reason for BitTorrent (Score:5, Informative)
Fantastic! (Score:4, Informative)
My sister needs a laptop for work and I have been steering her towards a G4 mac. MS office adds $AUD300 to the price, which offends me, mainly because of the huge profit microsoft make out of it.
Having this available could make it a much easier decision for her to buy the macintosh.
Very much a Mac Application (Score:5, Informative)
Everything else is great, and infinitely superior to the old port of OpenOffice.org to the Mac's X11 - for instance, copy-and-paste works fully (styled text is no problem whatsoever); file associations work correctly; native printing, fonts, anti-aliased line art are just fine. Even more recent, esoteric stuff like Spotlight searches are fine - when I installed Tiger, all my documents got neatly indexed without me lifting a finger.
It's in an application bundle, it stores its settings in ~/Library/ - apart from those grey, rectangular buttons and controls, it's a complete, modern Mac application.
Honestly, don't judge it on first appearances or screenshots (I've found numerous Mac 'ports' of software which seem to concentrate too much on cosmetics rather than functionality) - it's truly wonderful. For anyone looking for a free office suite on their Mac, here it is!
Good news (Score:3, Informative)
In terms of competition, there's KOffice for MacOS X I kept my eyes on, see http://kde.opendarwin.org/ [opendarwin.org]. Still pre-alpha however.
I use and love iWorks. Keynote is simply *great*. But it is not free (forget open source). And iWorks, for the moment, lacks a spreedsheet, which OOO doesn't. Thanks to OOO and NeoOfficeJ developpers! :-)
Re:Cached on mirrordot (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What's with the J? (Score:2, Informative)
Coralized link (Score:3, Informative)
http://neowiki.sixthcrusade.com.nyud.net:8090/ind
Though, frankly, there's not much there to read.
Greg
Re:They recommend MS Office :) (Score:2, Informative)
It's far from perfect on the Mac, but I'm always astounded at how much it is better on the Mac than on Windows.
Re:What's with the J? (Score:5, Informative)
So, once upon a time there was a NeoOffice/C which used the C bindings, but for some reason it was very difficult to develop. The authors then abandoned it and used the Java bindings instead, producing NeoOffice/J. This was only feasible because OpenOffice makes heavy use of Java internally.
(One minor point of confusion for me: The NeoOffice FAQ claims that NeoOffice/C used the Cocoa API, but I thought that was only for Objective C and Java. I thought for pure C you had to go with the Carbon API.)
Screenshot (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just when they get if finished.... (Score:4, Informative)
Now "if" it was totally written in Java, then I would say it would be very easy to port
My gut feeling is that a significant portion of it was done in C, and thus it will take some time to get that part compiled and working again.
Re:Allegedly this is a patent issue... (Score:4, Informative)
Fonts -- meaning that file (or files) of computer data that represent a particular typeface -- are absolutely copyrightable. That's why Linux distributors cannot distribute the fonts from Microsoft or Apple (though an end-user can download some fonts from Microsoft's web site, or use the fonts from their own Windows installation).
It is the typeface itself that cannot be copyrighted. But that's the way the characters look, not the data that represents them to a computer. So I'm free to clone the Arial typeface by developing my own font that represents it, but I can't just copy Microsoft's font.
Developing a good font from a typeface is a lot of hard work, I hear.
Re:What's with the J? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just when they get if finished.... (Score:1, Informative)
- The parts that are done in Java should not be a problem, too (except if you write really, really ugly code)
- So leftover are parts that are written in C AND are not part of standart openoffice AND rely on big endianess. I'm pretty shure that should not be much.
My Experiences (Score:5, Informative)
1) In the early releases NeoOffice/J was sluggish. There were rendering delays with first word typed, pull-down menus, and switching tools, among other things. I am pleased to say that the interface speed has increased through the release candidate schedule. That said, you will find there are still delays here and there that may bother you. They bothered me until I used Office X again. That product has UI delays as well, just in different places. At this point I think it is a wash.
2) Stability (e.g. random crashes) was an issue on the earlier releases. These have been largely successfully addressed. In fact, when using the last RC to get work done I did not experience any crashes. Very nice.
3) The UI is somewhat confusing, since it departs from some of the standard metaphors we usually see in office software. The primary example is the tight coupling of the different suite functions. Those that are used to using one application for spreadsheets and another for presentations will need to aclimate to a monolithic application. This is not a big change per se; it just takes some getting used to. There are other minor departures, such as the lack of aqua widgets and different locations of buttons and menu items. Once I got used to these differences, I found the product usable for my project work.
All that being said, I have decided to do all my personal project work in NeoOffice/J. Why? The data I generate in my personal projects is valuable to me personally. I would like to maximize the chances of being able to read it in the distant future. Since the Open Office file format is completely open and documented, I believe that the OO.org file format has the greatest chance of being read 15-20 years from now. If there is not any software in 15-20 years that can read the format, then due to the open licensing on the format I could write/hire someone to write a program to read the documents. Try doing that with some archaic closed format. I will deal with quirks today to enable access to the my data tomorrow.
-LLM
Re:How much Java? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What if it were written in Java? (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, but at least they go over better than X11 apps!
They Just Don't Get It: Why I'm Sticking With Word (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What if it were written in Java? (Score:3, Informative)
Did you notice that Mono is primarily an implementation of
Statements like "Furthermore, our release of the Rotor source code base with a specific license on its use gives wide use to our patents for a particular (non-commercial) purpose, and as we explicitly state we are open to additional licenses for other purposes." -- Microsoft applies for
In Europe, Microsoft are already showing their true colors [edri.org]: "If developers want to build the protocols into their products, they must agree not to distribute that product in source-code form, or to subject it to licenses that require source-code disclosure, a formula that excludes many open source licenses."
And they have other tricks up their sleeve, "At every release the focus of Microsoft's tools that provide a compelling Linux development environment could break or prevent mono-compatibility the same way Microsoft's J++ broke Java compatibility by replacing JavaBeans, RMI,and JNI with COM, DCOM, Direct/J. At that point, you would face the choice of either forking the API's or forking over some royalty payments." --Mono developer meeting [oreillynet.com]
With Mono you can hitch your wagon to Microsoft's oxen, never knowing just where they're going to go.
Re:Valid reason for BitTorrent (Score:2, Informative)
Yes: simply grab the torrent and when your client asks where you want to save it, point it right at the one you already downloaded. Your client will then compare your file against the torrent and decide that you've already got it, but leave you in the swarm.
Well Done NO/J devs! (Score:5, Informative)
What's really amazing is that almost all of the coding work is done by Patrick Luby (pluby) with a fairly small group of very dedicated testers and contributors. Despite the complexity of the code and the magnitude of the task, Patrick and the rest of his small team of volutneers has managed to release the only viable alternateive to MS Office for Mac OSX.
I have been installing NeoOffice/J on lab machines at work for over a year now. NO/J 1.1 is a significant improvement over the earlier versions. It now integrates with the menubar, opens and closes like a Mac app, and even uses OSX's keyboard shortcuts. Heck, they even managed to integrate it with SpotLight!
For everyone out there using a Mac, be sure to check it out. Also, if you like the program don't forget to donate. [planamesa.com] Even $50 is much appreciated. Think of it, an entire office suite on your platform of choice with perfect interoperability with Linux, Windows and Solaris. And it's Open Source. Surely that's worth a donation.
Re:open office fork? (Score:5, Informative)
Over time, it appeared that NeoOffice/J was developing faster, and it would be easier to get it to a usable state than the OpenOffice OS X port, so the OpenOffice OS X port was abandoned. NeoOffice/J is the `official' OS X version of OpenOffice. Additionally, the NeoOffice/J people will be handling the official port of OpenOffice 2.0 to OS X.
Re:They recommend MS Office :) (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It'd probably be easier (Score:3, Informative)
Swing and AWT, not Java (Score:3, Informative)
Ever tried SWT [eclipse.org] from Eclipse [eclipse.org]? It's the Java widget toolkit that doesn't suck! (as much).
That said, I'm very happy with C++ and Qt [trollech.com]. Well, except the C++ bit, but I find Java just as gag-worthy in different ways (Java 1.5 goes some way to rectifying the issues with generics and the collections framework, though. It's still WAY too verbose and static for a truly nice language, though).
Re:They Just Don't Get It: Why I'm Sticking With W (Score:1, Informative)
Command-C to copy
Open terminal
pbpaste|wc -w