NeoOffice 2.0 Alpha 3 Released

ndansmith writes "NeoOffice, the port of OpenOffice.org to Mac OS X, has made their 2.0 Alpha 3 release available for download. From NeoOffice's site: 'This release is based on the OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 code and includes all of the new OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 features,' including the utilization of Open Document formats. Currently only the PowerPC version of the software is available publicly, but users can download the Intel version by purchasing a membership."

Re:Intel binaries

[Trillan]

The subscription stuff is a very small window. According to their site, the release will be free starting July 1st. That's only two weeks away.

hope this is great

[ChristTrekker]

I broke down and bought MS Office (for the third time, once for every major architecture/OS combo of the Mac) a little over a year ago because nothing else on the Mac was quite "prime time" enough for my wife to use, and using Office98 in Classic was flaky. I was willing to go along with a few nonstandard UI decisions, or jump an extra hurdle of file incompatibility, or deal with X11, but inflicting any of those on her practically amounts to spousal abuse. After all, I'd just gotten her to "switch" from her slow/glitchy old PC, and just having things be in different locations was hard enough on her.

Now, I've heard good things about MS Office running with Rosetta, so maybe it won't be an issue at all whenever I upgrade to a x86 Mac (the 4th combo). But I really hope that NeoOffice 2 is sufficiently "prime time" by then so that I don't have to be reliant on proprietary packages. I'd prefer to use open standards.

In some ways I wonder if NeoOffice is really the best route to take with regards to porting OOo. It seems like an awful lot of work. I'm no expert in these matters, but wouldn't it make sense for OOo to use the wxWidgets framework? Compile against the platform-appropriate wx implementation (wxGTK, wxCocoa, etc.), and boom, you're done. Obviously, switching frameworks at all would be a big effort, but once it was done it would be easy for everyone going forward, and the Mac version wouldn't always be lagging behind.

Re:Just use the X11 Build, avoid NeoOffice

[Enrique1218]

You don't know the mac community very well. We will pay for anything (sometimes more than Windows users) so long as it just works. $80 is small potatoes next to the $300 we already shell out for that other office suite. I certainly think it is reasonable to charge to support development. Even with the developers volunteering their time, new Intel Macs cost money and money don't grow on trees. From what I heard, this project isn't supported by the main open office project. The money is got to come from somewhere and if you are not contributing to the source code, you might as well shell out the cash. It is only fair if this project is important to you.

Re:hope this is great

[ChristTrekker]

Obviously this would have been the one way to go, if OO.o were being designed today.

WxWidgets isn't exactly new. But I suppose it wasn't as mature when OOo started.

Because believe me, if it were that easy, they'd be doing it.

But if it's "easy enough" that two guys can "yank out" the standard GUI stuff, and hook in Mac-native GUI stuff, then it seems to be that OOo as a whole is pretty well abstracted/designed. The question is whether the developers see enough "long run" benefit to redoing that part in the core OOo, or not. If so, then porting is practially a non-issue. If not, then projects like NeoOffice will forever be redoing their work again and again, and they'll always be behind. Heck, if two guys can yank out the GUI bits and replace it with native Cocoa stuff, why couldn't two (or more) guys do the same and replace with wx stuff instead? Obviously I'm not a GUI developer or I'd understand better why this isn't a realistic option.