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NeoOffice/J 1.1 Finally In Beta 73

Posted by timothy from the open-goodness dept.
VValdo writes "Hot on the heels of yesterday's vigorous debate re OpenOffice.org for OS X, the 1.1 beta of NeoOffice/J is now available. Based on Oo.o 1.1.3, improvements include native Mac menus, scroll wheel support, text drag-and-drop, smaller PDFs, new icons, localization for 40 languages, automatic update notification, and much more. No X11 server required!"
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NeoOffice/J 1.1 Finally In Beta More

NeoOffice/J 1.1 Finally In Beta

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  • Its a start.. (Score:2, Informative)

    by CoolCat ( 594452 )
    Great start (and work) but, as a mac user, it still looks like shit compared to OfficeX or any other native OS X application. Hint: Use native wiggets.

    • Re:Its a start.. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Bastian ( 66383 )
      They're working on it.

      OO.o is so non-Mac-friendly that it has been a huge undertaking to get NeoOffice even this far.

    • Re:Its a start.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @11:44AM (#11159533) Homepage
      I'm inclined to cut them a little slack. From what I've read, it sounds like it's been hard work to get this thing operational, and they haven't been getting a whole lot of support.

      I'm sure they understand the interface isn't all that it should be, but it is a beta (they aren't done), and you generally worry about fixing up the interface *after* you get the program *running*.

      Now, if only someone would make a native OSX port of Evolution.

    • Re:Its a start.. (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ...it still looks like shit compared to OfficeX...

      Ok, NeoOffice/J beta isn't eye candy yet. Consider another angle besides appearances. Last week while using OfficeX to build a bibliography for my PhD Critical Literature Review under extreme time pressure I had the gut-wrenching experience of MSWord crashing over and over due to formatting issues and probably software bloat.

      I switched to LaTeX/BibTeX, but the harshly bitter aftertaste of that MSWord experience lingers still. Now, along comes a free and

    • it still looks like shit compared to OfficeX or any other native OS X application. Hint: Use native wiggets.

      Hint: It's FREE.

      Of course, you could VOLUNTEER to jump in and write the code to implement the "native widgets" if it is that important to you.

      I for one, think they are doing a GREAT job, and I can't wait to see how it comes along. This is hard work, seriously.
    • "it still looks like shit compared to OfficeX or any other native OS X application. Hint: Use native wiggets."

      Congratulations, you just flamed one of of the truly good and great Mac coders out there, working his butt off so you can use a quality office package without coughing up $300.You are one dumb fuck. If you took the time to check out the screenshots, there is no excuse for you to have not read the information on the project:

      "Here's a caveat though--while NeoOffice/J is remarkably stable and f
      • right then... quote only half of my sentence to have a reason to call me dickhead.

        I never said it was it was bad, I criticized the UI and ONLY the UI (yeah yeah, I know they are working on it!). All I commented was what I saw, and honestly, It aint't pretty. OO.org which this is based on is great except the UI, all versions, all platforms.

        So what if OfficeX costs $300, It's my freaking money, if a product in my opinion is worth that I'll pay it, OSS/Free? Sure, just donate a to the project. (Do you think
    • It looks fine. Fonts are great and all! I think you are thinking of a previous release.
  • I don't get it. Why did they come up with a version in C (even if it was a hack or a planning tool) and then a version in Java? What does "fundamental mismatches between OpenOffice.org and Cocoa technologies" mean. What about using Carbon instead?

    I got the impression that OO.org is basically OS X unfriendly and that won't change... is that correct?

    Also I am the only one who thinks that the tone of NeoOffice/J FAQ is fairly unfriendly and angy?

    • Re:NeoOffice (J vs. C) (Score:4, Informative)

      by NardofDoom ( 821951 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @08:33AM (#11157614)
      I used to think that, but when I tried NeoOffice/J I found it to be stable and as snappy as MS Office.

      There's a universal fear of Java due to experience with poorly coded apps in the past. (*cough*Limewire*cough) But I can honestly say that is unfounded when it comes to NeoOffice/J.

      Example: Start up time from double-click to document window for NeoOffice/J is 10 seconds. Start up time for MS Word is 14 seconds on my 1.5GHz 15" Powerbook G4 w/ 1GB of RAM.

      • It very much depends on the amount of RAM available: with 256MB NeoOffice/J was a dog, but adding another 512MB made it extremely usable; so much so that I've now switched from using Office to NeoOffice/J (1GHz Powerbook).
      • OK... The whole reason I read the NeoOffice/C FAQ is that I have had "experience with poorly coded apps in the past". But when I got there it came off being "OO.org is severely incompatible with OS X" sort of thing. That gave me the impression that a native OO.org was an uphill battle at best and a fool's errand at worst.

        (Not that the guys doing this are fools)

        Some where some said aquify Koffice which sounds sort of intriguing. My massive investigation (Google: "OS X" Native Koffice) in to this is tantalizi

    • No, I also thought that FAQ was unreasonably hostile. It does anything but encourage me to try the software. In particular, I love this:

      NeoOffice/J is an open source development project staffed entirely by volunteers. What this means is that a handful of people spend their spare time working on NeoOffice/J instead of spending it with their family and friends. So, don't expect any response.

      Translation: "Go F**k Yourselves".
      One of those volunteers should spend about 10 minutes rewriting that FAQ.

        1. One of those volunteers should spend about 10 minutes rewriting that FAQ.

        You can spend time on /. and not do it yourself?

        • You can spend time on /. and not do it yourself?

          I'm not one of their volunteers and have no interest in working on that project.

          While I realize you're just trying to be a jerk, you've accidentally brought up a good point. With a FAQ that reads like that, it gives the whole project a rather negative overtone. Forget encouraging people to not try the software. Projecting an attitude like that, how many people are they encouraging to not help with the project?
            1. While I realize you're just trying to be a jerk, you've accidentally brought up a good point.

            Actually, I'm entirely serious. Consider Wikipedia. OSS documentation is not much different.

        • >You can spend time on /. and not do it yourself? ...because I consider my time on /. better spent on /. than working with a group of people who appear to be hostile towards their user base (whether such is actually the case is irrelevant) on a product I don't and--unless it comes a very long way from where it is now and even then--will probably never use?

          I appreciate what the people at NeoOffice/J are doing and the time they put into producing this software, but it is up to them to make their product d

      • Re:NeoOffice (J vs. C) (Score:4, Informative)

        by capmilk ( 604826 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @09:28AM (#11158022)
        The translation is rather: "Don't ask stupid questions - we might answer good ones, though".
        • The translation is rather: "Don't ask stupid questions - we might answer good ones, though".

          I'm sure that's the meaning they intended to convey, but their poor wording pushes a message that's far from that.
      • That's the impression I got which is the exact opposite to my experience with all the other OSS projects I've tinkered with. Typically I get a faster, more detailed response than with 'professional' tech support services I have contracts with. That includes my experience with NetBSD and I thought that the BSD guys were supposed to be hostile and arrogant.

        In response to the other reply: I have plenty of time and am certainly willing to rewrite their FAQ, however I doubt they'd except input from someone who

        • That's the impression I got which is the exact opposite to my experience with all the other OSS projects I've tinkered with. Typically I get a faster, more detailed response than with 'professional' tech support services I have contracts with.

          Exactly. I've had to ask a few questions to project volunteers in the past (especially on smaller projects where the field of existing documentation is rather small). Every time, I've been thrilled by the friendly, quick and accurate responses I've gotten. In some
        • You may want to look at NeoOffice guys posting on earlier thread (mentioned in parent story) -- they're explicit enough as to what are J vs C issues. Basically, Sun (sponsor of OOo) has neither interest nor experiance in MacOS X software writing.

      • Re:NeoOffice (J vs. C) (Score:2, Informative)

        by p4ul13 ( 560810 )
        Agreed that the tone of the FAQ needs a bit of work, but the folks involved are definitly a pleasure to work with. I ran into a bug with a previous release where Neo/J was crashing and one of the developers (Patrick) worked with me for a couple days so he could patch the bug in the installer that caused this.

    • But, this is the beauty of the portability of C? Clearly making OOO run on OS X just requires a recompile, if anyone with half a brain wrote the code, because C is portable, right? Oh, wait a minute. You're telling me that it can run on Linux, but can't even be run (with the proper UI) on a closely related UNIX without extensive architectural changes? Good thing it's in C, so it's blazingly fast. What's that, it's pretty slow, well ok then.

      They should have done something similar to ThinkFree office from th

    • NeoOffice is NOT written in Java (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ...the external bit-blasting and event code is in Java. Basically it's using an X11 to Java translator. The rest, as I gather, is simply OpenOffice.

      • 98.8% C++, less then 1% Java (Score:5, Informative)

        by soullessbastard ( 596494 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @10:53AM (#11158918) Homepage Journal
        Don't forget that OpenOffice.org itself is huge, and it is a C++ application. It's actually a beautiful example of how horridly slow C++ can get, both running and compiling. NeoOffice/J is just OpenOffice.org with some extensions.

        I did a line count analysis [openoffice.org] a while back in response to some FUD spreading, but it's probably still roughly accurate. On a source code level, less then 2% of NeoOffice/J is actually Java. 98% of the code is straight from OpenOffice.org. And not all of the NeoOffice/J code is in Java, so the actual figure is probably less then that.

        On a binary level, the size of the combined JAR files for NeoOffice/J and OpenOffice.org are only 3.7 MB of the application's 317 MB footprint. And those JAR files include the support OOo has for Java applets, DocBook filters, and the like. The "Java" magic NeoOffice/J adds to OpenOffice.org is essentially contained in a single file "vcl.jar", which is 70k. I'm sure someone can do those percentages themselves as I left my RPN calculator at home ;)

        ed

    • Why we used J over C (Score:5, Informative)

      by soullessbastard ( 596494 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @11:09AM (#11159112) Homepage Journal
      At one point in antiquity, both J and C were prototypes. C was really a hack to explore technologies, but J was engineered a bit more carefully. The idea was eventually that OOo X11 would yield to the short-term solution of J to the long term solution of C.

      Unfortunately, Cocoa was just too difficult to fit to the OOo event model. While I hacked and struggled with Cocoa until he smote my ruin upon the mountainside, the Java+Carbon of J the amazing engineering of Patrick and his testing crew was triumphant and created a stable, functional app. When it comes down to it, redoing all that work in Cocoa is just reinventing the wheel for no tangible benefit aside from pure geek thrills. Even if done, the result still wouldn't be using ObjC, Interface Builder, or any of the other tools that make Cocoa so scrumptious. It'd be the penultimate Cocoa hack job. Doing OOo in Cocoa is kind of like trying to ram a square peg into a round hole. Cocoa suffers from the fatal flaw of all framework technologies; they really don't work well for building apps that are not engineered to conform to the framework design.

      Frustrated with Cocoa, the decision I came to was to shelve C for a while and go join Patrick and help him bring Aqua into J, stop splitting our efforts, and combine to make a kickass app. Thus the Aqua menus were born with the other widgets to come. Eventually when J is finished, I am hoping to find time to take the "core" parts of J out and wrap them into a framework that can then be embedded into Cocoa apps, similar to the Gecko engine. That's a long way off yet...

      For more of my own logic read a more detailed discussion [neooffice.org] about why J is the best engineering choice for now.

      ed
      • When you port the 'core parts' out of J will you be moving to Obj-C or directly to C/C++? I would assume that an Obj-C/C/C++ port would be best completed while using Python as your OOP and proceduraly prototyping layer, Obj-C as your core framework layer and C/C++ as your performance/optimization layer.

        BTW - How is the performance of Obj-C over Java, from what I have seen, Java is getting very close to the performance of C'ish languages but still with a large resource footprint, particuarily memory.

        I'd be
    • OO.org 1. series is dependant on either the Windows GUI or an X -server.

      OO.Org 2 series is supposed to make a tranistion to Aqua easier.

      NeoOffice is a quick port designed to get people up to speed.

      I run OO.org 1.2 under OS X and X and it takes a long time to load up. Of course it has to start the X server, then load Open Office, then the document, and it looks ugly. But it does work.
  • I just got the 1.1 Alpha version working and now I have to upgrade again!

    Thanks a lot.


    • I just got the 1.1 Alpha version working and now I have to upgrade again!

      Anybody still remembers the good old QuarkXPress times when every update cost about $500 and was compulsory for the next update...?

      (BTW, have they changed this policy or have they forced everybody to switch to InDesign...?)

  • Neo (Score:3, Funny)

    by cuteseal ( 794590 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @08:49AM (#11157709) Homepage
    We've had our eye on you for some time now. It seems that you've been living two lives. In one life, you're OpenOffice, an open source multi-platform office productivity suite. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias NeoOffice/J that has been engineered to run natively on Mac OS X. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not.
  • nice to see the NeoOffice/J people have a sense of humor. From the website [planamesa.com]:

    Warning: all NeoOffice/J development and testing is done by volunteers so there are always some missing features and bugs. So if you expect software to be absolutely perfect before you install it, we recommend that you purchase a commercially supported office suite like MicrosoftTM Office
  • As I was reading about Donating to NeoOffice/J, I was wondering if NeoOffice/J was a non-profit. It does not appear to be, but now it has me wondering if they or any other opensource, non-commercial community software project could apply for and be approved for non-profit status.

    It isn't exactly helping the homeless, but if it isn't trying to make a buck and it's all open to the public, then why not?

    • Not yet because of history...and money. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by soullessbastard ( 596494 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @10:39AM (#11158756) Homepage Journal
      We're not a non-profit but we're also not a commercial entity either. We're a group of volunteers who are doing this and hosting the project. For two years we didn't have any type of donate page or the like and just encouraged people to contribute by answering questions in forums, testing, or developing. Funny enough, there are still people who don't want to contribute in those ways. This started a fairly vigorous discussion as to whether we should give those people another vehicle for helping out. You can check out the user community debate [neooffice.org] back in November as to how things wound up the way they are now and where they will hopefully be going.

      To organize as a non-profit in the state of California requires filing paperwork, meeting minimum tax requirements, and other state and federal requirements. We're not expecting to see a lot of monetary donations, so instead of shelling out all that capital to set up a new corporate entity and lose money we don't have (!) we just reused one of the S-corps we already had set up.

      We couldn't just take money directly as that opens us up to personal legal liability, a bad thing for us Americans with our predatory legal system. We also can't afford to do it personally due to tax reasons. Right now we're only hoping to get enough to pay for bandwidth and hosting costs. If people actually do start donating enough though we've already decided we'll go through all the hassle of setting up a non-profit entity. It's unfortunately not worth that much hassle for just a few hundred dollars in donations ;)

      Still, I'd rather encourage people to donate time, support, and hopefully code instead. It's much more useful then money. Unfortunately time and code are more then most people are able or willing to give :(

      ed

  • Translated docs in German, Italian, Japanese, ... (Score:3, Informative)

    by soullessbastard ( 596494 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @10:20AM (#11158526) Homepage Journal
    While the link in the story is to the English download pages, the site itself has the download instructions, FAQ, and other pages available in Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Japanese. You can use the language links at the top of the page or link to the language-agnostic download link [planamesa.com] which will redirect you automatically to the correct language based upon your browser user-info string.

    ed
  • Not to downplay the great achievement of Mac-ifying OOO, it is by far the best MS Office alternative for OS X yet. The only thing that keeps me from deleting the only remaining MS software on my HD is that my work (a publishing house) actually requires me to open and save in MS Word 5.1 for Macintosh format. Am I the only one who misses this? Has that format been reverse-engineered yet?

    • Re:No Word 5.1 compatibility? (Score:5, Informative)

      by soullessbastard ( 596494 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @11:15AM (#11159184) Homepage Journal
      Unfortunately that file format hasn't been reverse engineered yet. We're not focusing on doing the reverse file format engineering ourselves. We just don't have the resources (two programmers!) to focus on the old Mac file formats, or even the new Mac file formats like Keynote. I wrote some design specs [dashboardbuddha.com] to get developers started if you're curious, but I haven't had the time to do engineering for those features.

      The only "old school" Mac app that has had its format engineered is the old Mac WordPerfect, thanks to the OOo WordPerfect filter team [openoffice.org]. They integrated their code into NeoOffice/J and now we can sort of open the old Novell/Corel WordPerfect 3.5 formatted files. Note this still doesn't give you "show codes", just the files. I think the old MacLink Plus may have had a Word 5.1 to WP translator, though, so that might be a way to get at your legacy docs even if it is convoluted as all hell.

      ed

  • BitTorrent download (Score:5, Informative)

    by soullessbastard ( 596494 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @12:19PM (#11159973) Homepage Journal
    Although it's not on the main download page yet, we also do have a torrent available for the main installer:

    http://trinity.neooffice.org/torrents/NeoOfficeJ-1 .1_Beta.torrent [neooffice.org]

    There are only a couple of seeders right now, but if the mirrors slow to a crawl the torrent may be a better choice.

    ed

  • Not bad, but not good either. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mirkon ( 618432 ) <mirkon@noSPam.gmail.com> on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @12:30PM (#11160102) Homepage
    I've been using the X11 port for a long time now, and I was hoping Neo/J would offer some performance boost over the sluggish OOo/X11 system. While the interface is snappy and responsive, the program consumes a ridiculous amount of system resources. Over 100 MB of my physical memory? And I thought the kernel was a memory hog.

    I like the fact that I can use the Apple command key instead of ctrl, but unless the devs are willing to give me a free 512 MB or Gig DIMM, I think I'll wait for something with a smaller memory footprint.
    • I would suggest that since this application is FREE and that OfficeX is like $400, that the developers HAVE, in essence, given you a free Gig DIMM. :)
      • This is not a good stance to be on. This is emplying just because it is free it has the right to be lower quality. OO is slow on my system with a Gig of Ram (Its Maxed out). Thus I shelled out the cash for OfficeX Last year to have some way of good office tools, needless to say I am happy with OfficeX Until OO can really make a good brakethrew in their Mac offering of their product.
        • It absolutely has a right to be of lower quality. Would you expect a free meal at a homeless shelter to be the same quality as a $75 steak meal at Ruth's Chris? (ObNote: I am not a big fan of Ruth's Chris, but it is a national enough chain that most people have heard of it. Here in Portland I would say "Portland City Grill" or "Ringside")

          The WHOLE POINT of PAYING for software is that it is supposed to be good. If it is NOT, people won't pay for it. Now having said that, Microsoft has the advantage in

        • Re:Not bad, but not good either. (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          couple of things.
          one, yes it is a memory hog, but that is a part of OO.o, not the port. The Neo-guys port the software, they don't write it (99% of the code is pure OO.o code)

          second, this is a breakthrough. OO.o 1.1 without X11, native printing, aqua menues, wordperfect converters (which windows OO.o does NOT have).

          also, if you are basing your experience on 'last year' (so i assume you mean Neo 0.8 or so) then things have improved, both with the java and the OO.o code itself.

          this is not a low quality sof
    • The development curves are different for Open Source and comercial software.

      Once a comercial product ships and the company has your money there is little incentive to do small improvements. (Other than bug fixes) They do large releases and charge for them.

      Open Source is constantly being improved by people who just like seeing the programs get better. They make many small improvements and this results in a lot of "point releases".

      So just wait a bit and see if this doesn't become useable on your system.
    • Umm, most mac users I know always run at least 512 mb of ram with Panther. Anything under that and the entire OS is sluggish. RAM is cheap, so I don't care.
  • NeoOffice/J works so well for me that I find myself wondering why people bother with the OS X/X11 version. The hacking-free font handling especially is much nicer. At least until an OS-X-native version of OOo2 can be produced, I'd suggest NeoOffice/J as the version for slightly adventurous but non-hacker Mac users.
  • With more information here [sixthcrusade.com].

    Answers a lot of questions people are posting here, especially about the difference between the stable Neooffice/J and the older, experimental NeoOffice/C (Btw-- the C stands for "Cocoa" not the programming language C).

    W
  • ...if it's ugly and not all cutesy aqua; so long as it has, a grammar checker to catch all of my comma, splices and other such nonsense that I write.
    • FWIW, one of the primary reasons that neither OOo, NeoOffice/J, nor AbiWord have grammar checkers is that no good open source grammar checker tools exist yet. Just about any grammar checker worth its salt is completely closed source. There are some options available, though...

      The Link Grammar Parser [cmu.edu] is one that I've actually been keen on integrating with NeoOffice/J for quite some time. I have ideas on how to do so but have not yet had time to devote to it. I had been waiting for an OSS license for a
      • Yeah I've noticed this. I've downloaded pretty much every free and open source office suite or word processor out there. But I always grudgingly go back to Microsoft Word for only one reason - the grammar checker. It really does make a difference. I wouldn't worry about hunting down a grammar checker, because when there finally is a grammar checker on something open source it'll be BIG news anyway.
        • But I always grudgingly go back to Microsoft Word for only one reason - the grammar checker. It really does make a difference.
          I'm not convinced. The grammar rules that Word comes up with are pretty lame. They don't like technical journal - style text, and they aren't really much good at comprehending or commenting on well-written material in general. The grammar checker may catch some singular-plural mismatches but not much beyond that.
  • does anyone knows what happened to KOffice for Macs? i've read in january that there was a port planed but i havent seen anything new. is there some progress or is it canceled?

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