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OpenOffice 2.0 Preview Release
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Dec 20, 2004 12:16 PM
from the do-you-see-what-I-see dept.
from the do-you-see-what-I-see dept.
gmuslera writes "A preview release of
OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released, which has new
features like better MS-Office compatibility, an Access-like program and a more. Here is a review
of it with screenshots and how it performs. It's work in progress, maybe not recomended for production sites, but it is a good sample of what is coming."
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The Register? (Score:5, Funny)
OS X (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OS X (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OS X (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:OS X (Score:5, Funny)
When the enthalpy of Satan's domain is reduced to the point where dihydrogen oxide becomes solid, perhaps?
Seriously, I don't know. But do you really think that asking a subset of Slashdot is going to be any more informative than the officially maintained FAQs?
Parent
Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice (Score:5, Informative)
It will probably be a while before you can even see X11 support for 2.0. Eric just got the 2.0 X11 based code to *compile* for the first time yesterday and it won't even run as setup crashes.
Part of the problem is that OpenOffice.org really isn't a "team"...it's primarily Sun Microsystems. Sun has four priorities: Linux x86, Windows, Solaris, and Solaris x86. Sun pays no one to work on Mac OS X support. Since it isn't one of their priorities, they frequently code without keeping the special needs of Mac OS X in mind, doing stupid things like hard-coding shared library extensions to only be ".dll" or ".so", neither of which are used by Mac OS X. They can't claim ignorance since folks have been trying to write Mac OS X code for over three years now, but yet they still don't even keep simple compatibility needs like that in mind.
Getting true native support for OOo without X11 on Mac OS X is most likely not going to happen within the OpenOffice.org project. All of our native work has been going on in the NeoOffice/J [neooffice.org] project. It uses a mixture of Carbon and Java to run using ATSUI for native fonts and Quartz for native drawing and printing. We also use full GPL licensing so we can incorporate the good work of contributors who can't get their translations and patches into OOo due to licensing and politics.
The process of giving it Aqua widgets has already begun. The latest 1.1 Alpha patches use native Mac OS X menubars. Aquafication is slow, though, because our first priority is to make it functional first, then make it pretty second. It doesn't matter if it looks pretty if it crashes after 5 minutes!
For what it's worth, it's already taken over two years just to get NeoOffice/J to the point where the native Mac OS X support is functional. By functional I mean that it can copy and paste both formatted text and images with other Mac OS X applications, has correct fonts and font layouts, functions with most all of the Mac OS X printer drivers, launches properly from the finder, works with the scrollwheel on those funky mice some Mac users have, has an integrated WordPerfect filter, uses the Apple Installer, has automatic upgrade notification, automatically translates the interface based upon your preferred language in the System Preferences language pane, etc.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 X11 has no native non-X11 support in it, much less the level of integration with Mac that we've achieved with NeoOffice/J. It's taken two years of some really dedicated engineers (namely, Patrick) to get NeoJ up to that stage. Replicating all of that work within OOo will probably take nearly that long and perhaps longer if the experts aren't there to help.
NeoOffice/J is in fact OpenOffice.org 1.1.2, and is 97% identical on a source code level. It's even got bug fixes that aren't in the OOo GM (such as functional JDBC support). This week we're going to be taking NeoOffice/J to 1.1 Beta after all known crashing and deadlocks have been fixed. And...
NeoOffice/J 1.1 Beta will be based off of OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, which isn't even available for Mac OS X X11!
Just keep up to date on the latest Mac OS X porting news on trinity [neooffice.org] instead of the infrequently updated OOo pages. RSS feeds are available too.
And don't let all of the politics and scare tactics [openoffice.org] of the OpenOffice.org denziens scare you either. NeoOffice really is the 'official' place for Mac OS X native OpenOffice.org and is where all of us core developers work (Patrick, Dan, and Ed).
ed
Parent
Re:Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice (Score:5, Insightful)
The one thing I find depressing here is that Apple has not put some resources at this one. The benefit that Apple will get from having Native OOO is astronomical. The number of users who would be available to switch to OSX is much higher than people imagine.
Picture all those users who:
-- Don't want to pay for crazy Win32 OS prices
-- Don't want to pay for M$ Office prices
-- Are not sys admins (or capable of) and as such cannot, and should not, use linux
-- Who, rightly so, have an moral aversion to installing M$ software on a OSX box
-- Want stable enterprise quality office apps running on a stable system (OOO on OSX)
I know that the number of users that are above are in the millions globally. If OOO was native, all of the above could selling features of Mac OSX. I am not even thinking of the corporate possibilities here.
I know that many argue that M$ Office is available but it's way too unstable and the interface bites. Also programmability is poor.
Another argument against OOO on OSX is that apple has AppleWorks. But, apple has never and will never come close to the features programmability of OOO. Personally, I still consider AppleWorks a toy product not worthy of true enterprise Office hacking.
I am sure that Sun is aware of the benefits that Apple will gain by an native version and this is why they don't care to pay anybody to do the work.
Sad state of affairs
I am very glad that you have put in all the work so far and I will be glad to assist in the future in any of your 'forks' to get OOO 2.0 on OSX.
Keep up the good work!
JsD
[Looking forward to hacking python/javascript/... apps on top of OOO 2.0]
Parent
Re:OS X (Score:5, Insightful)
Has any software project (open source or commercial) ever decided to drop Mac support simply because they were so fucking sick of hearing OS X users whine about the look of the app clashing with their beautiful desktop?
It is true that Mac users often seem ungrateful in open source circles. I have heard them complain about lack of support for freeware open source programs many times, and it seems like beggars should not be so choosy. On the other hand, Open Office really is pretty awful on OS X. It does not integrate well with other programs, and does not support the majority of the features that make using OS X so much nicer than other systems. I do think OS X support should be a priority for the Open Office team since it is important to their cross-platform message for environments with a variety of systems deployed. It makes them a non-starter for any place with a few macs, that want to be consistent, and puts them at a disadvantage in comparisons with MS Office (Which runs as well on OS X as it does on Windows.) Since I can't really help out right now though, I can just make polite requests for improvements and hope for the best.
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Re:Time to exploit the freedom of free software. (Score:5, Insightful)
I fail to understand how any part of that response lies "on the other hand"--if anyone doesn't like what they get with free software, they have options. Two of those options are to learn to program and do the work themselves, or purchase the time and expertise of a programmer.
The "on the other hand" part is that they have valid issues to complain about, even if it is a free program. One of the reasons OS X is more popular on the desktop than Linux is that no one in Mac OS X forums ever tells you to learn how to program or RTFM. Learning to program for a non-programmer, or hiring a programmer are both pretty unreasonable solutions for most people. It is much cheaper and easier to just buy MS office (which is what most people do). There is nothing wrong with making polite feature requests. In fact it is very useful as it help the creators understand what people would like their software to do. On a very related topic, I'd just like to mention that I know a number of writers and artists who have expressed interest in helping out on open source projects. (Have you ever noticed how crappy the docs, help systems, and graphics are for many projects?) The response from the open source community has been profoundly negative. Polite offers of help and requests for information on what needs to be done have mostly been ignored and occasionally been flamed. The hostile and elitist attitudes of many open source zealots are really hurting the community. Perhaps you should be a little more understanding of non-programmers and you will find that they do have useful things to contribute, if you will let them. I know one open source game that lost the potential free services of one of the most talented graphic artists I know, simply because when he offered up a few sample textures and models for the game, he was flamed off the boards for offering them in the wrong format (something that could have been converted in about a minute if someone would have politely told him what format was used.) Comment like, "thats a windows only format MS-bitch" are not exactly going to win any friends. Now I'm not saying that you have been impolite, or that you are specifically causing a problem, but your attitude that non-programers have no right to make comments is just the sort of attitude that pushes talent away.
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Re:OS X (Score:5, Informative)
and many many more things. All of those tasks are huge. The first wasn't an issue for Linux but the rest were, and the work has been done primarily by Red Hat and Novell working together, as well as volunteers from the Linux community.
It probably helps that on Linux, people just got down to work and started fixing things, with the result that OO now tracks native themes in both GNOME and KDE, has a complete native Industrial icon theme (by the same Ximian artists that did the original GTK+/GNOME artwork), integrates with the native file pickers, gnome-vfs, and starts quickly (prelink and the GCC symbol visibility work was motivated largely by OO).
In contrast, whenever OO is mentioned on Slashdot all I see are comments bitching at the developer team and stupid (wrong) statistics being thrown around in an attempt to convince Sun to do the work even though they have no interest or need for it. Because, you know, Mac users are special so they shouldn't need to do the work themselves. The NeoOffice guys are the only ones I know of that are actually getting serious stuff done, and they seem to be years away from getting something that works well.
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Native Widgets? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is key, IMO, to desktop integration and widespread adoption in at least the corporate desktop sector.
Re:Native Widgets? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Murphys Law (Score:5, Funny)
Guess I'll try and update Thunderbird so the next release hits the servers this afternoon.
Warning: Unstable build (Score:4, Funny)
An Access-like program? (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when those were called "databases."
Re:An Access-like program? (Score:5, Informative)
MySQL is a database, yet I hardly think you'd call it "access-like".
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Re:An Access-like program? (Score:5, Funny)
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In XP theme ?... (Score:4, Interesting)
And YTF is "StarOffice 8" == "OpenOffice 2.0"
The Writer screenshot looks better than MS word but how about editing. I've had problems with fonts in RTF output (which is what I use by choice).
That's it I'm switching this weekend !!
Re:In XP theme ?... (Score:4, Insightful)
Frankly, at least if they change it for Linux, I think a more Windowsish theme will help it's acceptance; it's closer to what people know and use now.
Parent
Version History (Score:4, Informative)
A few months after buying StarDivision, Sun opensources the commercial application under the brand OpenOffice.org (notice the
Now it is logical that the StarOffice versioning keeps keeping pace with OpenOffice, as it is basicaly the same application minus templates and support. From a marketing point of view keeping two brands makes sense.
There is much more history to StarDivision than this, but that is another story.
Cheers!
Parent
Native MacOS X support? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone have news on this? Or is Open Office effectively dead on the Mac?
Re:Native MacOS X support? (Score:5, Informative)
OpenOffice.org X11 on the mac is effectively dead because it is horrendously understaffed. There are less then 5 people actively working on it. Not good for an 8 million line + application.
While Apple's developer documentation may be first class, OpenOffice.org X11 is not built using Apple-specific technologies. It is built from the command line and is using X11 with its own internal widget toolkit. Oh yeah, and takes 9 hours to compile on a dual G5 2GHz. That hurdle is a bit too high for just someone to stroll on in and casually check out the project.
OpenOffice.org is a large and thorny Unix application. There are very few Mac OS X programmers that actually have X11 and Unix skills and the patience to deal with something of its size. Most developers come to the project and are like "can I build it in XCode" or "can I use InterfaceBuilder", find out they can't and then leave. The lack of a sufficiently large pool of skilled volunteer programming experts effectively killed OOo on the Mac from the start.
The native work has effectively moved to the NeoOffice/J [neooffice.org] project, which is 95% code identical to OpenOffice.org and uses Carbon and Java instead of X11. It still doesn't use Apple development tools directly, but it does have two of the original developers of OOo Mac OS X working on it continuously.
ed
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Re:Native MacOS X support? (Score:5, Informative)
Neooffice/J was the proof of concept to bring OO 1.x to the Aqua system. It looks like they made some progress - using Aqua widgets and controls in some places, but only a few, and doing away with the need for an X server. But it doesn't look like they've gotten much farther than that, or readied 2.0 to be aqua-native. That's a shame.
Parent
NeoOffice/J going Beta this week...2.0 plans (Score:4, Informative)
NeoOffice/J isn't a prototype anymore. It got so good and stable that we decided to make it an official project. We just haven't changed the slogans and copy yet. NeoOffice/J 1.1 [neooffice.org] is going to be going beta this week, based off of OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 (not even available for Mac OS X X11). It will contain Aqua menus, too.
After we work out all the bugs and get NeoOffice/J 1.1 to final release, we're going to plow ahead with scrollbars and buttons and whathaveyou for a 1.5 release. We'll also be starting on the native work for 2.0 sometime next year, but that will take some effort, considering OOo 2.0 isn't finalized yet.
Our goal is to put out a final NeoOffice/J that is stable, well tested, polished, but most importantly, fully functional. It's generally our opinion that it's more important to be bug-free then pretty. It doesn't matter if it's got pretty blue buttons if it crashes after typing 5 words, and there are definitely testers and users who agree
ed
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Re:Native MacOS X support? (Score:4, Informative)
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I tried it... (Score:5, Interesting)
* Liked the new installer, much easier to use and less klunky (on Winders).
* Loved the new interface, it is very clean and much more pleasant to use than v1.
* Loved the new features - the media gallery, etc.
* Hated how it wouldn't save embedded images. I spend half an hour working on documentation with embedded images, saved, reloaded, no images. Back to v1 for me.
I do plan on testing the heck out of the pre-releases (and sending it on CDs to all my friends), but once burned, twice shy for me.
One thing I would personally really like to see is a command line utility to automatically resave v1 files (or indeed any other format) in the v2 format. Run that over a directory of your files and never (in theory) have file problems again.
Damien
You know you've been on slashdot too long.. (Score:5, Funny)
Kjella
Parent
Compatibility (Score:5, Interesting)
I have an old version of my resume I drafted in Word some time ago. It's not very complicated - just a few boxes of text and a table for the main content. It's been edited, exported to different formats, reimported and mucked up all over the place a few times over. The last version of it opens just fine in any version of Word, and looks good, but I can only imagine the leftover crud from several edits and imports/exports sitting around in the file.
So far, I've yet to come across another office suite that renders the documents the same way word does - although late builds of OO 1.x have come close. I downloaded the 1.91 preview version, on a FC3 system with the msfonts installed, did an almost-perfect import. One line that sits at the bottom of the document in word gets pushed to the next page in OO 1.91. Other than that, it's a faithful reproductoin of the special characters (bullets and a few accent marks) and hand-adjusted spacing in the table. The fonts all match and the lines break in the same place.
I think "opens Lou's resume pretty well" should be an advertised feature in any Word competitor.
Re:Compatibility (Score:4, Insightful)
Since you as the the resume author are the one with OO and your potential employer is the one most likely running MS office.
I haven't grabbed the latest version of OO but I do know that all older versions do not render my resume the same way that MS Word does.
Parent
Very glad! (Score:5, Interesting)
A little background: My company is REALLY unhappy with Microsoft after a BSA audit started after a disgruntled employee left here. We didn't have much in the way of compliance problems, but the nazi-like BSA left a really bad taste in their mouths.
Re:Very glad! (Score:4, Interesting)
People who steal software must be punished. It's good for everybody. It's good for open source, it good for makers of proprietary software.
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Access clone.. (Score:4, Interesting)
The Access clone doesn't appear to open access mdb files. Hats off to OO for making the clone, but it's useless to companies that already have bunch of access stuff already.
I'm in the process of rewriting an Access DB that grew out of control for a few years. Remodeling the database has been a nightmare. The new app will use MySQL or Oracle instead using all SQL92 syntax. We're using a java web MVC framework for the interface.
Re:Access clone.. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it doesn't open an mdb natively with all the forms & reports. But you can ODBC in, and CRUD all the tables, data, and queries.
useless to companies that already have bunch of access stuff already.
Those wishing to move their inhouse apps off Access can use this to create new OOo front ends, using their current data, in its current location in the MDB.
Then, later, move the data out of Access, and retain the new, OOo based, frontend.
Remodeling/rebuilding a database is only a nightmare if the first one was built shoddily. Neither OOo, Access, Oracle, MySQL, or any other db tool can prevent that.
Parent
Broken record… (Score:5, Interesting)
WordPerfect import (Score:4, Insightful)
My wife and our church both used WordPerfect for years, and have thousands of documents in that format. Existing conversion utilities, particularly free ones, really don't work well at all.
At this point we'd be happy just preserving the text and the basic formatting. Having images and complex formatting import properly would be nice, but at this point we're really just looking for a way out of WP-land.
It's kind of hard to believe that it's that hard to read a file format.
Re:WordPerfect import (Score:5, Informative)
http://wp.openoffice.org/
Parent
64 bit? (Score:5, Interesting)
will compile as a 64 bit application under
AMD64 based Linux. The currrent source is VERY
badly broken in 64 bit compatibility.
Re:64 bit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Pretty Neat (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:is it just me (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:is it just me (Score:5, Funny)
I commend the parent for catching this fault and letting the world know that all of those millions of lines of code are cheapened by a stupid mspaint splash logo in preview release. The open source world needs more UI experts like him to show us our faults and where we need to focus our attentions to "make it" in the real world.
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Re:is it just me (Score:5, Insightful)
this release will install as OpenOffice.org 1.9.65, it comes with ugly hacked splash screen to make clear, that this is not the final 2.0 build.
Parent
Re:is it just me (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:A more? (Score:4, Funny)
That's not just an eel..
That's a moray.
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Re:Better MS Office Support (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Better MS Office Support (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Better MS Office Support (Score:5, Insightful)
if the OOo-made document opens in Office 97, 2000, and 2002, but breaks in 2003, then it *IS* MS's deliberate attempt to break compatability.
Parent
Re:Better MS Office Support (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, let's assume just for the sake of argument that you had full access to all required documentation, had direct access to the internal MS code that reads/writes the files, and access to the developers who designed the file spec in the first place. Given that, you should be able to create a pretty good import/export tool, no?
So Microsoft shouldn't have any problems with their own format, right? After all, it can't be that tricky, and they DO have all of the advantages listed above.
Ah, but have you ever tried to import older Word documents into the most recent version of Word? Or even worse, to try to save a newer Word file in an older file format? It doesn't usually crash, but the translation makes OOo's Word export look pretty good.
Now, I realize that I haven't directly answered your question. All that the above is trying to do is convey the underlying complexity of the problem, and the fact that MS itself can't even get it right.
To address the specific issue of broken compatability: Given that MS makes a great deal (most?) of its money from lock-in to its proprietary formats, I would say that they have a vested interest in protecting their monopoly, no?
Of course it isn't proveable (think anti-trust ramifications here), but would it not be convenient, given this vast complexity of code, if some change just so happened to break compatability with a competitor?
Especially when you realize that when MS-Word imports older documents (even from previous versions of MS-Word), they get run through an intermediate converter that changes them to RTF, and then the RTF is imported.
You wouldn't expect the Word 97 -> RTF converter to need to change with each new release of Office, would you?
No, of course not. Not unless they were fixing a bug. And for a company where interoperability itself is a bug
Parent
Re:When will OO.o take out an NYT ad? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not really the same as the Firefox situation. Firefox is simply a better browser than IE, in almost all ways. Basically, the only reasonably acceptable reason for not using Firefox over IE is that you haven't heard of Firefox. Thus, the NYT ad makes sense.
OpenOffice, on the other hand, while getting very good, is still not as good as Microsoft Office in many ways. If you are on a platform that can run either, and you aren't picking based on philosophy (e.g., you simply hate Microsoft, or insist on open source software) or price, then MS Office is still the better choice.
So, any money that could be spent on an ad would be better spent on development and documentation, to try to close the gap with MS Office.
Parent
Re:Getting better but... (Score:4, Informative)
Abiword is very lightweight and far from being as feature-full as OO.o . If it does everything you want, you might as well stick with it, though.
As for MS Office, it loads that fast because it pre-loads in RAM at startup. You can do the same trick with OO.o and it'll load in a second. The loading times in the original article were WITHOUT the pre-load.
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