“[Sun’s] Siress gave an interview [to C|Net] in which he announced that Apple and Sun were collaborating on a version of Star Office for OSX, and the OpenOffice.org folks freaked. (Apple probably freaked, too, though they haven’t said much publicly about this whole thing). So, Sun has to do an about face and retract its prior statements. The easiest route is to try and discredit the CNET article, but since the article accurately reflects a taped interview with a senior PR person they can’t really ask CNET for a retraction.” The latest in the StarOffice/OSX PR opera.
So Now There’s No StarOffice Port for OSX? Not So Fast
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I’m tellin’ ya, Apple’s working all fronts at once!
What I want to know is why Corel is completely ignoring the Mac market with WordPerfect yet is in full storm trooper mode pushing Corel Draw at the Mac platform. Cant see any reason to move to a Mac if the only Word Processor is M$ Word. OpenOffice/Star Office looks interesting but it wont open heavily formatted .doc’s any better than WordPerfect 9.0. Not to mention OpenOffice wont open a .wpd at all.
Corel is Microsoft’s puppet these days. If Ms says “no”, Corel will say so too.
There are plenty of word processors on the Mac: AppleWorks, Mariner Write, Think Free Office and a few lesser known ones such as Okito Composer,
Corel was ignoring the Mac world long long before MS shored it up in the same way it shored up Apple. Terribly bad form to have two of your competitors go belly up while being sued for being a monopoly.
Just read something a couple days ago about Corel currently pursuing MS corporate clients that are unhappy with the new MS license/extortion plan. Seems like the puppets are careening out of control. What a shame.
I can tell you right now, that there WILL be a port of OpenOffice.org to Silicon Graphics’ IRIX. And that I’m working on it right now!
Actually, I’m writing the bridge, which is a horrible horrible part of the office, and for a number of good reasons takes a long time and has to be written in a mixture of C++, assembly and machine code.
Although getting on-topic (finally!)… I was talking to a bloke at SUN a few months ago, and he did say something about wanting to port to OSX then (although I can’t remember if that was just because his girlfriend had an apple laptop…).
Well, if there is no port to MacOSX available you can always go to beunited.org and get a copy for BeOS… 🙂
Actualy there’s a lot of basic word-processing habilities integrated in the Aqua core componets (Spell Checking, Print Previewing…), and I think that Apple may extend these capabilities to integrate them with OppenOffice. This could result in a blazing fast, affordable, standarts compatible office suite for the Mac!
Integration like this could mean that EVERY App in OSX will have acces to an powerfull text editing API! This and InkWell can make OSX the holy grail of text editing adn DTP
PS – Sorry my poor english!
:-D. I bet somebody at Sun is gonna be fired any time soon…
What I want to know is why Corel is completely ignoring the Mac market with WordPerfect
WordPerfect left the Mac market for the same reason Mac BU is considering pulling Office for Mac OS X. Lack of sales.
Corel is Microsoft’s puppet these days. If Ms says “no”, Corel will say so too.
Corel pulled WordPerfect a long time before it ever got the idea of Linux.
Terribly bad form to have two of your competitors go belly up while being sued for being a monopoly.
Corel considers Microsoft as a partner and vice versa, and consider WP Office not to have the same target audience with MS Office. 🙂
Actualy there’s a lot of basic word-processing habilities integrated in the Aqua core componets (Spell Checking, Print Previewing…)
These aren’t Aqua components, but rather Cocoa classes.
Very simple: I want StarOffice for my Mac
Someone from Sun stated the only thing that seperates apple laptops from being the de-facto laptop at sun (internally) is open(star)office’s ability to run on the platform. So naturally a nice carbonized interface would suit them.
Or, perhaps Sun employees would need/want to run the latest version of Java…
Or, perhaps Sun employees would need/want to run the latest version of Java…
Sorry, but what does Java has to do with all this?
MacOSX has a JRE built into it at OS level I believe, this is why Mozilla for OSX has no JRE.. all java apps and users use system JRE
..which I suspect isn’t the most recent “bleeding edge” version
Most of OpenOffice.org isn’t written in Java in the first place, and there hasn’t been any concreate plans to do so…
You can put OpenOffice into a Frame in Java, and build your own GUI around it. I imagine that this was what the SUN guys were going on about…
i.e.: do a little work on the vcl, remove the X dependency, then write the GUI in Java, using the UNO <-> Java bridge.
There really would be no point whatsoever in rewriting all of OpenOffice.org in Java – that’s just not going to happen. (OO.o can take up to 12 hours to compile on a dual Intel machine [according to the website – I’ve only ever compiled on IRIX], so even if it all went down to JVM bytecodes before being run, it would still be slow as mud).
Cheers,
Ralph
In addition to Java needs (which is needed for just about everything inside of Sun.) The other reason they wouldn’t use Mac laptops is that they are perfectly content with Hitachi laptops. You do know that Sun is Hitachi largest disk purchaser right?
Then of course there is the lack of an integrated three button mouse, and the stevie tax.
Sun ownes Staroffice and the openoffice code
Sun ownes Staroffice and the openoffice code
Sun wanted them in the first place. If one group of them find out that what they have been doing is useless, they would stop. And then others would also leave, guessing that Sun is also doing the same thing behind their backs. And so on.