“Sun and Apple have no concrete plans to codevelop a version of Sun’s StarOffice productivity suite for the Mac OS X operating system, two open-source developers and a Sun official said Monday. Sun held a conference call with the two OpenOffice developers on Monday to clarify that Sun and Apple are not working on their own project to create a version of OpenOffice for Mac OS X by year end. […] Sun has been in ongoing talks with Apple to see “what it would take” to make a version of StarOffice that had the look and feel of an Apple application, Siress said. These talks, however, are really little more than the same theoretical discussions that have been going on over the last couple of years, he said.” The report can be found at InfoWorld.
Sun and Apple NOT Working on Star Office for Mac
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Eugenia Loli
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I don’t know anything about Sun or Apple plans, but some volunteers of the OpenOffice.org project have an Aqua based prototype in a quite advanced stage, take a look, and if you can help with the work:
http://www.dashboardbuddha.com/OOo/first_aqua.html
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Sun should use Qt 3.x (www.trolltech.com) to make the port easy.
They’re not doing it……darn, darn, darn!
Well… I can’t say i’m really dissapointed. I’m not a big staroffice fan. I’d love to see gobe productive for macosx, that would be awesome. I’m not sure if it would be profitable for them tho :/
sooner or later OOo will be ported, and hopefully sun will use that to release SO. its all good for apple, they can never have too many applications available for their OS.
friendly reminder
the name of the project/product is “OpenOffice.org” not just “OpenOffice” .. always with “.org”.
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about Qt, OO.o architecture tightly binds to UNO and VCL.
it’s not just widgets (like Qt), it’s an object model.
The people that said Apple don’t need Microsoft because StarOffice is coming to Mac OS X?
Well OOo is being ported to OSX. And I think if Microsoft were to pull office, Sun would quickly decide to fill the void.
Well OOo is being ported to OSX. And I think if Microsoft were to pull office, Sun would quickly decide to fill the void.
I previously estimated 4 years, now I make it 3 years. If Apple wants to piss Microsoft off right now, they better make sure they get Sun to invest into the Mac port so it could be ready in a year and a half (they could make it shorter, only if they invest in the Mac port more than the Windows version).
“I’d love to see gobe productive for macosx, that would be awesome”
Gobe are the original AppleWorks team so, you can.
OpenOffice.org” is a dump name for a product. It may be the official name, but it’s still dump!
“.org” stands for “organisation”. So the product is an organisation?
Let’s call that thing OOoOS, “OpenOffice.org Office Suite”, to make the short form look even more stupid.
To do this, OpenOffice had to be ported to Qt first. OpenOffice/StarOffice uses its own GUI toolkit.
I thought OOo was written in Java. I thought it was essentially an immense applet. Can a Java app be ported to Qt?
OK, so there’ll still be OOo, but a decent commercial alternative to M$ ‘only mainstream languages supported even if you offer to do the work for free’ Word would have been much appreciated.
Did a third party put the kibosh on it, or did they really talk about it for two years just for the sake of their health? Another nail in the Mac’s coffin either way, IMO.
OOo was never written in Java.
[i]…. they better make sure they get Sun to invest into the Mac port … </>
I think they themselves should invest into OpenOffice. Sun already invest on StarOffice for their own platform why can’t Apple spend a little bit for their own office software. Maybe the 2 person team that work on http://www.dashboardbuddha.com/OOo/first_aqua.html a good starting point since they prove it can be done within 2 days and 2 person. Imagine what is the output if several others especially Apple employee or somebody that Apple paid works on it for few months.
From what I’ve seen of OpenOffice, even in its preliminary Aquafication, it needs a lot of work before it will look and act like a native OS X application. Unix programmers don’t seem to get that Apple UI conventions are there for function, not decoration. But I don’t think the status of this project is a major issue. I doubt that Microsoft is really going to discontinue Office for the Mac. If Apple wants an office suite that will let them thumb their nose at Microsoft with impunity, they’ll release a beefed-up version of AppleWorks. There are much more interesting things going on in Macland than simple ports of Unix software. Here’s the website of a new word processor built from the ground up for OS X: http://okito.net/composer/ .
ThinkFree Office is Java – maybe that’s what you were thinking of.