I bet this release will still have the incredible boring, dull and ugly icons for Windows. But I swear I’ve seen a OpenOffice with really nice icons. I suspect that it was for a versin packaged with Gentoo or something similar, but has anyone made a distribution with those icons for Windows as well?
Still only OOo 1.0 for Mac. Guess I’ll have to pick up MS Office 2004 when it ships. Say what you will about MS, at least they go to the trouble to make a version of office that feels like it belongs on the Mac, and not just a cheap port of the windows version.
Also the Debian version of OpenOffice comes with Ximian icons. (I believe they are Ximian design, is this correct?) Debian has done excellent job with OpenOffice – it comes with all the localizations and if you have ‘prelink’ installed, you get the option to prelink OpenOffice binaries, which makes OpenOffice super fast.
Well, I don’t really care if OpenOffice.org for the Mac looks like an integrated application or not, but what really ticks me off is the blatant lack of development happening for that platform. After all this time we’re still stuck with 1.0, really depressing (and obviously reason enough to buy Microsoft Office 2004 if we want to be able to do some actual work).
i must admit that it is quite annoying the way openoffice.org on the mac is only at 1.0 and it uses X instead of being a cocoa app but it still works for the majority of things you want to do. why would you bother spending over ā¬150 for MS’s word? also, openoffice.org is open source, the developers do all this amazing stuff for free so they don’t owe us anything. be thankful that there is some free alternative to a word processor that costs more than the costly Mac OS X.
It would be really nice if people did not jump the gun and announce that things are released then they are in fact not yet, but work in progress. Its not fun at all when hordes of people start hitting pages you are trying to hit, never mind complaints about servers not having promised files.
If GIMP 2.0 and Abiword (the latter in an aqua version) can be released for the Mac platform at the same time as the rest of the supported architectures, I wonder why OpenOffice.org can’t do the same.
The excuse that we should stop complaining and thank the devs for doing such a bang up job ‘for free’ is a moot point when you want to compete with commercial products out there. If you want to make joe end user, use your ‘open and free’ product instead of a closed and proprietary alternative, you might also want to listen to the complaints and grievances of the end user (who is hardly ever a programmer).
The point about the Mac being a ‘costly proprietary elitist platform with small and diminishing market share’ is irrelevant too. *NIX based application are easily ported (as is shown by the fink project and opendarwin ports system).
Microsoft Windows is a costly proprietary platform too, but OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 is up to date for that platform now, isn’t it? The word ‘elitist’ can be applied to any OS and to any userbase of an application. Some Photoshop users are elitist towards The Gimp and some BSD user can be elitist with regard to Linux. So I’ll just ignore that statement.
The complaint about the OpenOffice.org version for the Mac (using X) is very valid in my opinion. And not many of the alternatives (like NeoOffice and the likes) are any good on slower or older Mac systems (like my 800MHz ibook).
If there’s so much active development going on for the Mac version, it would be nice of them to update their homepage somewhat so we can all actively follow what’s happening.
I look forward to the day they succesfully complete the painstaking amount of work it will take to port OOo to Cocoa, so that all the highly qualified whiners at this site will have a chance to review how pretty the icons are.
Get real people. It’s a tremendous amount of work, the pay is low, and the quality of comments oozing out of this group indicates if they just add enough eye candy to it you’ll all be happy. I’ll be more impressed when you put your money where your mouths are.
I can’t stop thinking that word processing and spreadsheet is where all power is applied too but what counts is how it ALL works together (something MS has realized).
To me it seems like OOo is something like Office 6.0 (W95) version… now with XP things have gotten very powerful. However, no one would be happier than me if this started to become an option within a not so far away future.
You’ve never used used OOo to much of a degree, have you. In my experience, compatibility with MS documents is EXCELLENT and considered to be the best available except for Microsoft’s Office itself. Equivalents for Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Frontpage are provided. Microsoft have no equivalent for some OOo apps like Draw and Math. Native export to PDF/Flash is supported in the default installation. I could continue forever but I won’t.
It would be really nice if people did not jump the gun and announce that things are released then they are in fact not yet, but work in progress. Its not fun at all when hordes of people start hitting pages you are trying to hit, never mind complaints about servers not having promised files.
Huh? I am downloading it now… What do you mean by is not ready?
I look forward to the day they succesfully complete the painstaking amount of work it will take to port OOo to Cocoa, so that all the highly qualified whiners at this site will have a chance to review how pretty the icons are.
Get real people. It’s a tremendous amount of work, the pay is low, and the quality of comments oozing out of this group indicates if they just add enough eye candy to it you’ll all be happy. I’ll be more impressed when you put your money where your mouths are.
I’ve only spoken about an X version for OSX. I could care less about eye candy and an actual aqua port. But the fact remains that there’s hardly any updates on the Mac porting page for OpenOffice.org and that their latest official release is chugging behind a year.
The ‘put your money where your mouth is’ statement is one of those things that has to end. As an end user listening to the open source developers talking about how good of an alternative their product is, I should not be putting any money anywhere.
The devs want me to adopt their product instead of another proprietary application? Great, I will, but at least give me something that can compete with said proprietary application and not a piece of software that’s lagging behind a year (in comparison to other versions released on other architectures).
That’s the problem with mainstream acceptance of opensource applications. As an end user you’re only allowed to complain if you contributed to the project in some way or the other. Here’s a wakeup call: end users could care less about contributing, they just wanna get their work done!
If I was a windows or Linux user, it would be no problem, the 1.1.1 version is there. My grievances are about the fact that the X-windows version (I did not talk about a possible aqua port) for OSX is lagging behind with one year (or is it more?) and that the devs aren’t doing anything to keep the ‘potential’ users updated about the current state of affairs.
And in my experience, MS Powerpoint compatibility in OpenOffice is average at best. After importing one of my presentations, which tend to be 1 hour long lectures, I need to do so much reformatting that it is actually easier for me to create a new presentation from scratch.
I am the only one of my colleagues that use OpenOffice, and I have found that sharing Powerpoint files is not possible at this time using OpenOffice.
Also, doing the actual presentation using OpenOffice Impress is slower than in MS Powerpoint.
OK, I understand that a reengineering to the Cocoa platform takes _a lot of time_.
But what the hell is the problem with porting the Linux version to the Mac? There most (all?) BSD libraries, X11, gtk, Java, you-name-it.
The Mac-porting page only says Cocoa will come with 2.0, in the meantime all new OO releases quietly fail to mention Mac OS at all…
BTW: I’m not sure if porting OO to Cocoa will finally make it good. 1.1 was a usability nightmare to me (and I’m one who has used only Linux and NetBSD for years before my iBook!).
Anyway, the inofficial build for 1.1 for Mac OS failed to open even one stupid .doc which was the only reason for me to install it in the first place…
* the reason OpenOffice.org for MacOSX is not released in a release verison at teh same time as other platforms is very simple – there aren’t as many developers and testers spending their time on this as on the other supported platforms. If Abiword and GIMP are releasing their MacoSX versions at the same time, then they have differently partitioned developers / users than OpenOffice.org
* OpenOffice.org does not want to compete with commercial products – OpenOffice.org already competes with commercial products and very successfully so. Considering the changes going into the tree that will be OpenOfifce.org 2.0 one day, it will do that even more successfully in the future
* As far as proprietary platforms go, about 60% of OpenOffice.org users are presently on Windows, so there is no need to wonder why it is very well supported. There is no shortage of Ooo developers and users on Windows (unlike MacOSX). Unless linux desktos suddenly start gaining radicaly higher amounts of marketshare this is not likely to change anytime soon.
* NeoOffice and NeoOffice/J are OpenOffice.org based experimental forks/playgrounds.
I’m happy to get some clarification about the situation, but like I said, a bit more website updates (even if they are only every few weeks) would help us ‘simple’ endusers to know what’s going on and see things are still being actively worked on .
As a primary member (one of 3) on the OOo OS X team, here’s a couple things:
1) We’re going to hopefully have a 1.1.1 build out this week. There are a few things that need to be finalized with the install process, including multi-user support and Panther/Jaguar oddnesss.
2) Yes, we could be better about updating the docs. But the build process hasn’t really changed.
No Offense, but… If you want steady releases and a steady base of support, you shouldn’t be looking at OpenOffice.org. A Commercial solution, even if it’s not open and costs more, will give you the better experience.
Matter of fact is that OOo is not a commercial product and that things are “ready when they’re ready”. If this means that OOo for the Mac is delayed, then it is going to be delayed. There is only one remedy to this and that is to get more Mac developers to aid in the porting effort.
That’s the problem with mainstream acceptance of opensource applications. As an end user you’re only allowed to complain if you contributed to the project in some way or the other. Here’s a wakeup call: end users could care less about contributing, they just wanna get their work done!
Yeah, see .. you hear about how great and wonderful OO.o is and how everyone and their dog should be using it instead of MS Office. But the minute you say, “Well, what about xyz …”, the response is usually “Why don’t you quit whinning and fix it yourself?” And this also seems to apply for most of open source projects as well.
You’ve never used used OOo to much of a degree, have you. In my experience, compatibility with MS documents is EXCELLENT and considered to be the best available except for Microsoft’s Office itself. Equivalents for Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Frontpage are provided. Microsoft have no equivalent for some OOo apps like Draw and Math. Native export to PDF/Flash is supported in the default installation. I could continue forever but I won’t.
And the very second some criticism pops up you bang the abuse button. I use OOo quite a lot, I’m enthusiastic about the product but realistic about where it’s at. Hype harm, not the contrary. If we keep pushing OOo as a viable option without knowing it’s limitations we just damage our credability (very similar to what Linux world is doing).
OOo is good in many ways, just not competitive to MSOffice in terms of Powerpoint. Impress has a LONG way to go, but I see very little happening in that area. Impress lacks charts, options in charts, formatting and a whole bunch of other things. I’m not saying Powerpoint is awesome, I’m just saying it’s far much better than Impress.
OOo suffers from a lot in terms of “looks”, many pointed out the programs looks in Windows, I agree, it doesn’t look good. I could also say that working with things that are suppossed to look good simply doesn’t in OOo. Compatibility also lacks with MS Office (ESPECIALLY Backgrounds). These are perhaps not serious issues for technicians who use this like Notepad, but for a professional business user who are depending on things to look good it’s _CRUCIAL_.
Press the Report Abuse button again or perhaps take this post for what it is… criticism well needed!!!
If we keep pushing OOo as a viable option without knowing it’s limitations we just damage our credability (very similar to what Linux world is doing).
Ahem, GNU/Linux is a viable alternative, as long as you don’t expect it to be MS Windows or Mac OSX. It’s a pretty mature Operating System, but it needs to be handled differently then the mainstream Commercial Desktop OSes. (I’m guessing that on the serverside things are quite different).
With the official Release of the 1.1.1 it is planned that as fast as possibel a Technological Preview of the Mac 1.1.1 Version will be released too. So developing is still in procress.
Developing for the Mac Port is not that trivial as it may be, since not all Unixstuff runs out of the box and Mac OS X has its peculiarities.
Abiword and GIMP aren’t aquanative and if you take a exact look at them you will see that at least for Abiword you will need fink or something similiar. Same for GIMP. Abiword 2.0.x still isn’t avaiabel for the Mac as a stand-alone binary or did I oversee something.
Next. The Mac Porting team isn’t that big in numbers and most of them aren’t coders. I for myself can only try to build it, give feedback about errors during build process, do short testings of patches etc but I cannot code. The rest of time I try to help Users of OOo for Mac in forums like Macuser.de, Neooffice.org, ooodocs.org etc. NeoOffice/NeoofficeJ.
By now it becomes really annoying. Mac Users complaining about no OOo for Mac or for a not existing development or out of date version etc but not willing to help out of this misery by beeing active or by supporting. This can all be in limited complexity and in limited time but every helping hand is welcomened. If half ot the energy that is put into complainment would be put in support we would be at the same stage as the other plattforms.
I for one really, really appreciate all the dev work going on with OSX versions of OO.o and AbiWord and other apps. Sure, I wish a native version of OO.o would be available soon, but I recognize that there are limited developers and limited time. Anything you guys do is appreciated. I can’t wait for the day when these apps are released native for OSX. Thanks for all the hard work!
But if it’s hype from Microsoft then everybody embraces it. And even if it turns out to be not as great as the hype says, people don’t give a damn.
Oh really? Isn’t that why so many WANTS to leave MS platform but haven’t found something competitive? I’m telling you that following MS footsteps is not the right medicine. That’s what happened to me myself for instance. I listened to all this “Linux this, Linux that” and have tried a couple of times only to get dissatisfied. That’s when BeOS came and showed me that options IS possible just that delivering it is worth A LOT more than telling it is…
However, telling everyone that OOo owns MS Office is just naive… sure there are good things, but in my MS Office I can also save straight to PDF… not a big deal. I can also find Portrait/Landscape settings in a logical way…..
I’m NOT AGAINST OOo, I favour it, that’s why I use it even though I find it a less good product than MSOffice. But let’s keep things real shall we?
I don’t understand how anyone can justify complaining about a free piece of software. If you want it, downloaded it. If you want to pay $450 for MSO, write a check.
But griping about the progress of people who are donating their time, shows a great lack of character IMO.
Of course, you could all be MS astroturfers and we should just ignore you either way.
That’s what I was talking about earlier. A lot of open source advocates are trying hard to get people to start using their open souce alternatives instead of some existing, often more expensive, products. As long as the ‘it’s free, stop complaining and fix it yourself’ mentality stays, open source will never be a hit with joe end user.
The fact that someone is donating his/her time does not mean that we as end users get stripped from the right to complain about things not doing what we expect them to do. If a product is promoted as being a good alternative for something else and a user has problems because it in fact doesn’t live up to the hype, he should have a right to complain about that.
The ‘hey it’s free, quit your bitching’ mentality should stop. You either work on the project because you want to provide an as good a product as you possibly can (taking into account the complaints and grievances from those people you are targetting as endusers) or you just secretly develop the product without telling anyone about it (that way you won’t have to hear any complaints by anyone).
I would be happy to help test OOo 1.1.1 on the Mac, but someone has to first provide a half decent working binary for me to do that.
“That’s what I was talking about earlier. A lot of open source advocates are trying hard to get people to start using their open souce alternatives instead of some existing, often more expensive, products.”
You don’t get it, do you? Nobody cares whether you use an OpenSource product. If it meets your needs, great. If it doesn’t, use something that does.
Get it? Nobody cares about what you use.
Most people use what works for them. For me, that is Lyx, which actually runs rather well in OS X. You should also investigate Koffice, which also runs rather well on OS X.
So tell me… if nobody cares, why so many Linux zealots infest every Web forum on this planet to tell us how BSD suck and Linux rule and that any complaint against Linux is just FUD or trolling or whatever “Not in touch with reality” people use to not listen…
doggedblues, so you are saying no one has the right to complain about an open source project because it’s free?
“Hey this project whiped my harddisk clean”, “STFU n00b, it’s free, go fix it and stop complaining!”
Like I said before, I’m more than willing to help, give me an OOo 1.1.1 binary for MacOSX and I’ll start testing straight away.
My main gripe was the fact that on the Mac porting page there was no mention of active development. The last post was (has been solved now) from 9 november last year and the screenshots were even older.
You’re saying that I should be happy with a one year old binary on MacOSX. The day 1.1 was released everyone was saying how much better OpenOffice had become, how much better the interoperability with MS doc formats was, how much faster and feature rich! And now you expect me to say thank you for at least having the 1.0 version which is now regarded by most people as being dogslow and rather crappy?
I like this part of your post best:
“nobody gives a crap”
Yes indeed, and that mentality will get you a huge userbase for your product!
I’ve tried to check out the cvs source for the OSX port in the past but cvs said it couldn’t find the modules. I’m not experienced enough to contribute code, but I’d like to help test. I have other CS major friends who use Macs who would probably help test too.
The Safari Browser is based on a KDE app, so there is a precedent. It seems that various K office parts are already running quite successfully on OSX. Most people do not need all the features of MS office or OOo anyhow.
Seems that the OOO planet post already mentioned my name (oh boy, I’ve seem to be kicking some shins around here), but anyway, who of the Mac porting team do I contact to help out with announcements on the website (or testing in general)?
Doggedblues, I think you are the one who doesn’t get it.
TIME = MONEY
Every application takes time to get to grips with. If a user is frustrated because of a lack of documentation or support, s/he will see their effort as a waste of time and give up.
The original poster was right about the need for the “OSS mentality” to change.
I’ve been a part-time OpenOffice user since StarOffice was a free download from Sun. It’s good to see the OpenOffice team releasing updates. Download will have to wait for T1 access though – would take forever over my puny phone line. Perhaps they should consider doestributing an OpenOfficeLite? It’s hard to have a download product that competes with a commercial product that fills two CDs…
I do use Microsoft Office under Windows on my main computer, and will have to continue doing so until: 1) my boss stops using the TrackChanges and other complicated MS features 2) OpenOffice adds something comparable to Publisher. Also, it could be my imagination but the OpenOffice apps seem weak compared to Microsoft’s PowerPoint and Excel.
The thing is I do not care if somebody gives up. Let them use whatever they are happy with. If they are happy using Microsoft Office, let them use that.
I will explain to them what I see as some of the problems associated with proprietary file formats, but if somebody does not see this as an issue, then who am I tell him/her what to run?
People fail to see that I do mention alternatives. I told Crahan to try Lyx and Koffice in Mac OSX. I just think that if you do not like the alternatives, and cannot contribute in any meanigful way, there is no sense in complainging.
The OO.org developers would love to have a native version for the Mac by now. There just isn’t the manpower to do it at the speed that people want it. So people can do one of two things, help or hire someone to help. Complaining or denigrating the work that is given to you as labor of free love does not help.
I will say that at least Crahan seems to be willing to test binary builds and that is already a start. Most users, however, have this give-me-give-me mentality as if somebody owes them anything.
Finally, I will say use whatever meets your needs, but be honest about your needs. For me, I use joe or pico most of the time. They are very minimalist and allow me to grep for the content of what I have written very easily. When I need formatting I use Lyx, when I need to send in a widely readable format I use either text or PDF.
When I do a presentation, I export it to html or Flash and put it on my web site. There are always choices you can make. Assess your needs and use whatever meets those needs.
If an OO.org port is essential to your live, organize with other users, create a developer’s fund. If 5000 users each give $5 a month, you can hire quite a few developers in many parts of Asia for that money. Do something, do anything, just don’t simply complain.
Now I hope this is, indeed, 1.1.1 final I’m downloading. š
Anyway, kudos to the team. Great software. I love Writer.
My only real complaint is the lack of object linking(as in Object Linking and Embedding). You cannot put a live link to a Calc worksheet in a Writer document, Writer always creates a copy. In other words: you have to manually synchronize worksheets if you’re working with a separate spreadsheet. This is a serious deficiency. Not serious enough to put me off using OOo, but definitely a show-stopper for some people. I hope this gets addressed soon.
Keep in mind that MS Office did not appear from under the table, it took many people, time and money to build. It is more than 10 years old.
Which means that:
a) OO won’t replace MS Office in no time.
b) OO’s people are doing a Titanic effort mostly for free.
c) v1.0 is rubbish compared to v1.1 in load times, stability etc.
OO is good enough for many people, and most important is free. Version 2 looks very exciting.
But we all should keep in mind that for many, MS Office is still ok, they have already paid for it, and for some it even does things OO doesn’t do yet or that OO doesn’t do very well.
So keep credit where it is due. For the people that complain about “fix it yourself”, what do you expect to hear from people which work for free and get critizised for it?, get real, if OO doesn’t suit your needs do not use it.
Cost is really a moot point since the majourity of people are more than comfortable to pirate a copy or use a public computer that has it already; eg public library or school lab.
People *DO* care about who uses OOo since MS Office is a huge anchor tying people to Windows, switching them to OOo makes it easier for them to switch to Linux which is something *MANY* people want (personally I dont give a fu…freckle, but thats IMHO), there for anyone who wants widerspread desktop for Linux MUST care about what Average Joe thinks of it.
However there are many OSS people who don’t care about anything but what works for them. Why do they bother talking though? If they don’t care then why do they care to respond?
Nothing really, but if you’re going to say that OO.o is a suitable replacement (or even better than) MS Office, you shouldn’t respond with ‘stop whinning and fix it!’ when they start pointing out its flaws. People aren’t necessarily complaining about speed/functionality in OO.o as much as merely responding to zealots that are standing on rooftops singing its praises. I see it almost everytime any sort of MS Office comes up – somebody jumps in and yells “USE OPEN OFFICE!” With that kind of mentality, you should expect some criticism. And if you don’t want that kind of criticism, you need to figure out how to shut up the evangelists.
CraHan
doggedblues, so you are saying no one has the right to complain about an open source project because it’s free?
Only to those who claim it is better than xyz. Personally, I don’t think you should complain to the developers if the project sucks, unless they happen to be tooting their own horns. If that is the case, then it’s fair game
By CaptainPinko (IP: —.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com)
People *DO* care about who uses OOo since MS Office is a huge anchor tying people to Windows
Not really .. unless you need to run something that doesn’t currently work in Crossover, and assuming you can put up with the horrible fonts in CO
I just finished the build yesterday and 1.1.1rc3 is ALOT faster than 1.0.3.
1: Download 1.0.3 distribution and install all the programs as they are needed for building as well.
2: Install the August 2003 gcc update and switch to 3.3 as the main compiler.
3: Install X11 SDK and Java 1.4.1 SDK.
4: Checkout the code from CVS; I used cws_srx645_ooo111fix3 as it appeared to be the newest available last Saturday.
5: Follow the directions given on the Mac development stage. Before running the tcsh or sh script, edit it to correct non-settings in the ENVCDEFS variable:
-DBUILD_OS_MAJOR=10
-DBUILD_OS_MINOR=2
BUILD_OS_REV=8
I have 10.2.8 but you can put the panther settings in instead.
dmake and wait about 24 hours on a 1Ghz Mac…
Run the install as documented.
I veered off a bit by doing a ./setup -net so I could save local space. If you do that, you need to make a symlink between the program directory in the user OpenOffice dir and the main install program directory. If you don’t do this, “Start OpenOffice.org” program can’t find things for some reason.
One additional item you might want to do is copy the 1.0.3 truetype fonts to the 1.1.1 truetype directory so you get more fonts.
I’m hoping the true 1.1.1 MacOS release will deal with the fonts issue and tweek “Start OpenOffice.org” so it can properly start on a Network install layout.
1.1.1 is ALOT faster than 1.0.3 and has tons more goodies. Printer options are still weak but hopefully that can be worked on for 1.2 or 2.0.
Well, I won’t be migrating or using, Office 97 and up is just enough for anybody. Why would anyone want to move from incompatibility and just plain problems to Open Office Junk?
So when are they going to fix the most obvious bug of them all? The bloody gigantic speed problem! Ffs. OO is even slower than office XP on a pentium 90 ..
Dang, we used to have Utomo pre-releasing OOo releases, now we have Eugenia of OSNews.com doing it. It has not been released yet; it should be tomorrow, provided the mirrors are syncāed.
Yes, it will still have āboringā icons (these are Sun builds) – pretty icons come with Ximian builds, or even Fedora builds. And yes, we do have OOo 1.1.1 for OS X actually; weāre just not releasing it as we lack a support structure with the possible amount of questions that will arise. CraHan wants an updated webpage? Easy to talk, why not join the porting team And to those wanting Aqua-ified OOo for OS X, Neoffice or something will work (mostly).
For once, can we have an official release announcement from Louis for instance, without someone else blowing their horn?
I run OO 1.1.0 it runs fine on my machine. It never uses a high CPU percentage, which can make it feel a little slow at times, but generally I have no problems with speed on my 700 Cele laptop.
Since OpenOffice (NeoOffice) IS THE ONLY UNICODE OFFICE SUITE available for Mac OS X, it is rather boring to read all the comments about alternatives, such as Microsoft Office for Max OS X. MS Office v.X is useless for the majority of international Mac users, since it does not support Unicode. This is the reason why I use NeoOffice. I would hereby like to express my gratitude to the OOo & Neo developers. You have made my life tolerable using a Mac in a truly international office environment.
B U T : What is the most disturbing fact about Mac OS X and the whole issue about Mac and Mac-office-tools, is the fact that Apples own flagship office application, AppleWorks, is still based on the ancient 10 years old code from ClarisWorks and is totally useless for those of us who need Unicode application for doing their every day office work.
This is pathetic. Apples own flagship office suite is completely dead in development. Dead, coma. What Apple international customers get when they buy a brand new Apple computer, with a band new unicode Unix operating system, is a 10 years old non-unicode carbon office app that just recently got a support for a wheel mouse! Get it ? 10 years old, carbon app on a band new Unix operating system ! Now, thats what I call the speed of evolution, or Darwinism in action!
The german magazine Ct ran a test in the recent issue on word processors. The emphasis of the test was to be able to handle big documents with lots of footnotes, pictures … you name it, the standard case in scientific work and serious text processing.
To sum it up, Word basically got one of the worst places with the usual problems which havenĀ“t been fixed for almost a decade now.
The funny thing is, that the biggest stability and the least problems, had:OpenOffice, Textmaker and a DTP program.
I think that OpenOffice.org1.1.1 is excellent and the developers should be thanked for doing a wonderful job. Not everybody can afford the ridiculous prices that Microsoft charges for MS Office, with its very restrictive EULA, while OOo1.1.1 is free to download and install on as many machines as one wants.
OpenOffice.org1.1 has amazed me with its abilities; Writer, for example being able to handle DTP work with ease, and its database capabilitites are a revelation!
No, OpenOffice.org1.1 and 1.1.1 do not have MS Office’s polish, but people seem to forget that you are paying a very hefty premium for MS Office, so it should be pretty fanastic, but then so is the latest version of Wordperfect.
For us ordinary mortals who aren’t into the finer points of macro generation and VBA, OpenOffice.org1.1.1 will more than suffice until version 2 is ready, which, from looking at the details looks to be a definite winner, with a relational database and Outlook equivalent at long last.
I bet this release will still have the incredible boring, dull and ugly icons for Windows. But I swear I’ve seen a OpenOffice with really nice icons. I suspect that it was for a versin packaged with Gentoo or something similar, but has anyone made a distribution with those icons for Windows as well?
Still only OOo 1.0 for Mac. Guess I’ll have to pick up MS Office 2004 when it ships. Say what you will about MS, at least they go to the trouble to make a version of office that feels like it belongs on the Mac, and not just a cheap port of the windows version.
check out http://www.kde-look.org/. Beside the Redmond styles, you will find all you need for the eye-candy of your desktop.
OO is a good alternative But I’ve notice, it’s quite slow to launch on linux os with low end hardware.
Also the Debian version of OpenOffice comes with Ximian icons. (I believe they are Ximian design, is this correct?) Debian has done excellent job with OpenOffice – it comes with all the localizations and if you have ‘prelink’ installed, you get the option to prelink OpenOffice binaries, which makes OpenOffice super fast.
Well, maybe not super fast but faster than in most other distros, anyway. š
It’s not a cheap port of the Windows version, it’s a cheap port of the Unix version.
Erik
Well, I don’t really care if OpenOffice.org for the Mac looks like an integrated application or not, but what really ticks me off is the blatant lack of development happening for that platform. After all this time we’re still stuck with 1.0, really depressing (and obviously reason enough to buy Microsoft Office 2004 if we want to be able to do some actual work).
If you want to see a Aqua’fied’ OpenOffice help the development effort and stop complaining about it.
See http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ for the development effort
i must admit that it is quite annoying the way openoffice.org on the mac is only at 1.0 and it uses X instead of being a cocoa app but it still works for the majority of things you want to do. why would you bother spending over ā¬150 for MS’s word? also, openoffice.org is open source, the developers do all this amazing stuff for free so they don’t owe us anything. be thankful that there is some free alternative to a word processor that costs more than the costly Mac OS X.
It would be really nice if people did not jump the gun and announce that things are released then they are in fact not yet, but work in progress. Its not fun at all when hordes of people start hitting pages you are trying to hit, never mind complaints about servers not having promised files.
the OOo porting folks are heavily working on an 1.1.1 version. It’s not trivial….
the Linux/Unix versions which ship the Ximian iconset are patched to support alpha colors (the icons use that).
AFAIK there’s no final code for that for win32 yet.
I think it is worked on, though…
If GIMP 2.0 and Abiword (the latter in an aqua version) can be released for the Mac platform at the same time as the rest of the supported architectures, I wonder why OpenOffice.org can’t do the same.
The excuse that we should stop complaining and thank the devs for doing such a bang up job ‘for free’ is a moot point when you want to compete with commercial products out there. If you want to make joe end user, use your ‘open and free’ product instead of a closed and proprietary alternative, you might also want to listen to the complaints and grievances of the end user (who is hardly ever a programmer).
The point about the Mac being a ‘costly proprietary elitist platform with small and diminishing market share’ is irrelevant too. *NIX based application are easily ported (as is shown by the fink project and opendarwin ports system).
Microsoft Windows is a costly proprietary platform too, but OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 is up to date for that platform now, isn’t it? The word ‘elitist’ can be applied to any OS and to any userbase of an application. Some Photoshop users are elitist towards The Gimp and some BSD user can be elitist with regard to Linux. So I’ll just ignore that statement.
The complaint about the OpenOffice.org version for the Mac (using X) is very valid in my opinion. And not many of the alternatives (like NeoOffice and the likes) are any good on slower or older Mac systems (like my 800MHz ibook).
On the OpenOffice.org Mac porting page:
“Mac OS X OpenOffice.org Port
Updated 2003-11-09, by Dan Williams”
If there’s so much active development going on for the Mac version, it would be nice of them to update their homepage somewhat so we can all actively follow what’s happening.
I look forward to the day they succesfully complete the painstaking amount of work it will take to port OOo to Cocoa, so that all the highly qualified whiners at this site will have a chance to review how pretty the icons are.
Get real people. It’s a tremendous amount of work, the pay is low, and the quality of comments oozing out of this group indicates if they just add enough eye candy to it you’ll all be happy. I’ll be more impressed when you put your money where your mouths are.
with MS Office and powerpoint ?
I can’t stop thinking that word processing and spreadsheet is where all power is applied too but what counts is how it ALL works together (something MS has realized).
To me it seems like OOo is something like Office 6.0 (W95) version… now with XP things have gotten very powerful. However, no one would be happier than me if this started to become an option within a not so far away future.
You’ve never used used OOo to much of a degree, have you. In my experience, compatibility with MS documents is EXCELLENT and considered to be the best available except for Microsoft’s Office itself. Equivalents for Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Frontpage are provided. Microsoft have no equivalent for some OOo apps like Draw and Math. Native export to PDF/Flash is supported in the default installation. I could continue forever but I won’t.
Sander Vesik:
It would be really nice if people did not jump the gun and announce that things are released then they are in fact not yet, but work in progress. Its not fun at all when hordes of people start hitting pages you are trying to hit, never mind complaints about servers not having promised files.
Huh? I am downloading it now… What do you mean by is not ready?
I look forward to the day they succesfully complete the painstaking amount of work it will take to port OOo to Cocoa, so that all the highly qualified whiners at this site will have a chance to review how pretty the icons are.
Get real people. It’s a tremendous amount of work, the pay is low, and the quality of comments oozing out of this group indicates if they just add enough eye candy to it you’ll all be happy. I’ll be more impressed when you put your money where your mouths are.
I’ve only spoken about an X version for OSX. I could care less about eye candy and an actual aqua port. But the fact remains that there’s hardly any updates on the Mac porting page for OpenOffice.org and that their latest official release is chugging behind a year.
The ‘put your money where your mouth is’ statement is one of those things that has to end. As an end user listening to the open source developers talking about how good of an alternative their product is, I should not be putting any money anywhere.
The devs want me to adopt their product instead of another proprietary application? Great, I will, but at least give me something that can compete with said proprietary application and not a piece of software that’s lagging behind a year (in comparison to other versions released on other architectures).
That’s the problem with mainstream acceptance of opensource applications. As an end user you’re only allowed to complain if you contributed to the project in some way or the other. Here’s a wakeup call: end users could care less about contributing, they just wanna get their work done!
If I was a windows or Linux user, it would be no problem, the 1.1.1 version is there. My grievances are about the fact that the X-windows version (I did not talk about a possible aqua port) for OSX is lagging behind with one year (or is it more?) and that the devs aren’t doing anything to keep the ‘potential’ users updated about the current state of affairs.
And in my experience, MS Powerpoint compatibility in OpenOffice is average at best. After importing one of my presentations, which tend to be 1 hour long lectures, I need to do so much reformatting that it is actually easier for me to create a new presentation from scratch.
I am the only one of my colleagues that use OpenOffice, and I have found that sharing Powerpoint files is not possible at this time using OpenOffice.
Also, doing the actual presentation using OpenOffice Impress is slower than in MS Powerpoint.
OK, I understand that a reengineering to the Cocoa platform takes _a lot of time_.
But what the hell is the problem with porting the Linux version to the Mac? There most (all?) BSD libraries, X11, gtk, Java, you-name-it.
The Mac-porting page only says Cocoa will come with 2.0, in the meantime all new OO releases quietly fail to mention Mac OS at all…
BTW: I’m not sure if porting OO to Cocoa will finally make it good. 1.1 was a usability nightmare to me (and I’m one who has used only Linux and NetBSD for years before my iBook!).
Anyway, the inofficial build for 1.1 for Mac OS failed to open even one stupid .doc which was the only reason for me to install it in the first place…
So, just a couple of points:
* the reason OpenOffice.org for MacOSX is not released in a release verison at teh same time as other platforms is very simple – there aren’t as many developers and testers spending their time on this as on the other supported platforms. If Abiword and GIMP are releasing their MacoSX versions at the same time, then they have differently partitioned developers / users than OpenOffice.org
* OpenOffice.org does not want to compete with commercial products – OpenOffice.org already competes with commercial products and very successfully so. Considering the changes going into the tree that will be OpenOfifce.org 2.0 one day, it will do that even more successfully in the future
* As far as proprietary platforms go, about 60% of OpenOffice.org users are presently on Windows, so there is no need to wonder why it is very well supported. There is no shortage of Ooo developers and users on Windows (unlike MacOSX). Unless linux desktos suddenly start gaining radicaly higher amounts of marketshare this is not likely to change anytime soon.
* NeoOffice and NeoOffice/J are OpenOffice.org based experimental forks/playgrounds.
And I am one of the ‘devs’
I’m happy to get some clarification about the situation, but like I said, a bit more website updates (even if they are only every few weeks) would help us ‘simple’ endusers to know what’s going on and see things are still being actively worked on .
the whole thing publically is discussed at [email protected]. Look at the archives
well, the website updates are up to the mac porters – I imagine they won’t turn somebody volunteering to help with the website down š
What’s all the comments about OOo only having 1.0 on Mac? What’s this then: http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/11×11.png
Hi,
As a primary member (one of 3) on the OOo OS X team, here’s a couple things:
1) We’re going to hopefully have a 1.1.1 build out this week. There are a few things that need to be finalized with the install process, including multi-user support and Panther/Jaguar oddnesss.
2) Yes, we could be better about updating the docs. But the build process hasn’t really changed.
3) Aqua work is going on with either NeoOffice/J or NeoOffice. Stuff I do is usually referenced from http://www.iceni.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi
4) If people stopped complaining and helped out, we’d be doine by now
Dan
No Offense, but… If you want steady releases and a steady base of support, you shouldn’t be looking at OpenOffice.org. A Commercial solution, even if it’s not open and costs more, will give you the better experience.
Matter of fact is that OOo is not a commercial product and that things are “ready when they’re ready”. If this means that OOo for the Mac is delayed, then it is going to be delayed. There is only one remedy to this and that is to get more Mac developers to aid in the porting effort.
That’s the problem with mainstream acceptance of opensource applications. As an end user you’re only allowed to complain if you contributed to the project in some way or the other. Here’s a wakeup call: end users could care less about contributing, they just wanna get their work done!
Yeah, see .. you hear about how great and wonderful OO.o is and how everyone and their dog should be using it instead of MS Office. But the minute you say, “Well, what about xyz …”, the response is usually “Why don’t you quit whinning and fix it yourself?” And this also seems to apply for most of open source projects as well.
Whatever.
I just finished compiling 1.1.0 2 hours ago!!!!!!!!!!!
ahh!!
Fine, you made me do it. Once they get re-staticized, the changes will be there.
First I would like to say congratulations to all OpenOffice.org coders, they do a great job. I use it on windows and linux.
Oh and maybe you guys would like to take a look at http://www.neooffice.org .
You’ve never used used OOo to much of a degree, have you. In my experience, compatibility with MS documents is EXCELLENT and considered to be the best available except for Microsoft’s Office itself. Equivalents for Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Frontpage are provided. Microsoft have no equivalent for some OOo apps like Draw and Math. Native export to PDF/Flash is supported in the default installation. I could continue forever but I won’t.
And the very second some criticism pops up you bang the abuse button. I use OOo quite a lot, I’m enthusiastic about the product but realistic about where it’s at. Hype harm, not the contrary. If we keep pushing OOo as a viable option without knowing it’s limitations we just damage our credability (very similar to what Linux world is doing).
OOo is good in many ways, just not competitive to MSOffice in terms of Powerpoint. Impress has a LONG way to go, but I see very little happening in that area. Impress lacks charts, options in charts, formatting and a whole bunch of other things. I’m not saying Powerpoint is awesome, I’m just saying it’s far much better than Impress.
OOo suffers from a lot in terms of “looks”, many pointed out the programs looks in Windows, I agree, it doesn’t look good. I could also say that working with things that are suppossed to look good simply doesn’t in OOo. Compatibility also lacks with MS Office (ESPECIALLY Backgrounds). These are perhaps not serious issues for technicians who use this like Notepad, but for a professional business user who are depending on things to look good it’s _CRUCIAL_.
Press the Report Abuse button again or perhaps take this post for what it is… criticism well needed!!!
If we keep pushing OOo as a viable option without knowing it’s limitations we just damage our credability (very similar to what Linux world is doing).
Ahem, GNU/Linux is a viable alternative, as long as you don’t expect it to be MS Windows or Mac OSX. It’s a pretty mature Operating System, but it needs to be handled differently then the mainstream Commercial Desktop OSes. (I’m guessing that on the serverside things are quite different).
With the official Release of the 1.1.1 it is planned that as fast as possibel a Technological Preview of the Mac 1.1.1 Version will be released too. So developing is still in procress.
Developing for the Mac Port is not that trivial as it may be, since not all Unixstuff runs out of the box and Mac OS X has its peculiarities.
Abiword and GIMP aren’t aquanative and if you take a exact look at them you will see that at least for Abiword you will need fink or something similiar. Same for GIMP. Abiword 2.0.x still isn’t avaiabel for the Mac as a stand-alone binary or did I oversee something.
Next. The Mac Porting team isn’t that big in numbers and most of them aren’t coders. I for myself can only try to build it, give feedback about errors during build process, do short testings of patches etc but I cannot code. The rest of time I try to help Users of OOo for Mac in forums like Macuser.de, Neooffice.org, ooodocs.org etc. NeoOffice/NeoofficeJ.
By now it becomes really annoying. Mac Users complaining about no OOo for Mac or for a not existing development or out of date version etc but not willing to help out of this misery by beeing active or by supporting. This can all be in limited complexity and in limited time but every helping hand is welcomened. If half ot the energy that is put into complainment would be put in support we would be at the same stage as the other plattforms.
Regards,
Eric Hoch
de.OpenOffice.org Teammember
If I am not mistaken, Neo office is a test bed for the OpenOffice.org Mac development and Dan even showed it off at WWDC a year or two ago.
And what really is the problem with that anyway?
“Hype harm, not the contrary.”
But if it’s hype from Microsoft then everybody embraces it. And even if it turns out to be not as great as the hype says, people don’t give a damn.
“Abiword 2.0.x still isn’t avaiabel for the Mac as a stand-alone binary or did I oversee something.”
This is true, but the AbiWord team just released an alpha build of a native OSX port of AbiWord 2.1.1:
http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/23/1652200&mode=thread
I for one really, really appreciate all the dev work going on with OSX versions of OO.o and AbiWord and other apps. Sure, I wish a native version of OO.o would be available soon, but I recognize that there are limited developers and limited time. Anything you guys do is appreciated. I can’t wait for the day when these apps are released native for OSX. Thanks for all the hard work!
I just installed 1.1.0 on Linux yesterday. Ugh, I should have waited a day
But if it’s hype from Microsoft then everybody embraces it. And even if it turns out to be not as great as the hype says, people don’t give a damn.
Oh really? Isn’t that why so many WANTS to leave MS platform but haven’t found something competitive? I’m telling you that following MS footsteps is not the right medicine. That’s what happened to me myself for instance. I listened to all this “Linux this, Linux that” and have tried a couple of times only to get dissatisfied. That’s when BeOS came and showed me that options IS possible just that delivering it is worth A LOT more than telling it is…
However, telling everyone that OOo owns MS Office is just naive… sure there are good things, but in my MS Office I can also save straight to PDF… not a big deal. I can also find Portrait/Landscape settings in a logical way…..
I’m NOT AGAINST OOo, I favour it, that’s why I use it even though I find it a less good product than MSOffice. But let’s keep things real shall we?
I don’t understand how anyone can justify complaining about a free piece of software. If you want it, downloaded it. If you want to pay $450 for MSO, write a check.
But griping about the progress of people who are donating their time, shows a great lack of character IMO.
Of course, you could all be MS astroturfers and we should just ignore you either way.
d@
That’s what I was talking about earlier. A lot of open source advocates are trying hard to get people to start using their open souce alternatives instead of some existing, often more expensive, products. As long as the ‘it’s free, stop complaining and fix it yourself’ mentality stays, open source will never be a hit with joe end user.
The fact that someone is donating his/her time does not mean that we as end users get stripped from the right to complain about things not doing what we expect them to do. If a product is promoted as being a good alternative for something else and a user has problems because it in fact doesn’t live up to the hype, he should have a right to complain about that.
The ‘hey it’s free, quit your bitching’ mentality should stop. You either work on the project because you want to provide an as good a product as you possibly can (taking into account the complaints and grievances from those people you are targetting as endusers) or you just secretly develop the product without telling anyone about it (that way you won’t have to hear any complaints by anyone).
I would be happy to help test OOo 1.1.1 on the Mac, but someone has to first provide a half decent working binary for me to do that.
“That’s what I was talking about earlier. A lot of open source advocates are trying hard to get people to start using their open souce alternatives instead of some existing, often more expensive, products.”
You don’t get it, do you? Nobody cares whether you use an OpenSource product. If it meets your needs, great. If it doesn’t, use something that does.
Get it? Nobody cares about what you use.
Most people use what works for them. For me, that is Lyx, which actually runs rather well in OS X. You should also investigate Koffice, which also runs rather well on OS X.
Get it? Nobody cares about what you use.
So tell me… if nobody cares, why so many Linux zealots infest every Web forum on this planet to tell us how BSD suck and Linux rule and that any complaint against Linux is just FUD or trolling or whatever “Not in touch with reality” people use to not listen…
A lot of people seem to care
doggedblues, so you are saying no one has the right to complain about an open source project because it’s free?
“Hey this project whiped my harddisk clean”, “STFU n00b, it’s free, go fix it and stop complaining!”
Like I said before, I’m more than willing to help, give me an OOo 1.1.1 binary for MacOSX and I’ll start testing straight away.
My main gripe was the fact that on the Mac porting page there was no mention of active development. The last post was (has been solved now) from 9 november last year and the screenshots were even older.
You’re saying that I should be happy with a one year old binary on MacOSX. The day 1.1 was released everyone was saying how much better OpenOffice had become, how much better the interoperability with MS doc formats was, how much faster and feature rich! And now you expect me to say thank you for at least having the 1.0 version which is now regarded by most people as being dogslow and rather crappy?
I like this part of your post best:
“nobody gives a crap”
Yes indeed, and that mentality will get you a huge userbase for your product!
I’ve tried to check out the cvs source for the OSX port in the past but cvs said it couldn’t find the modules. I’m not experienced enough to contribute code, but I’d like to help test. I have other CS major friends who use Macs who would probably help test too.
Better check out the
http://ooo.ximian.com/planet
OOO Planet for real facts.
The Safari Browser is based on a KDE app, so there is a precedent. It seems that various K office parts are already running quite successfully on OSX. Most people do not need all the features of MS office or OOo anyhow.
Seems that the OOO planet post already mentioned my name (oh boy, I’ve seem to be kicking some shins around here), but anyway, who of the Mac porting team do I contact to help out with announcements on the website (or testing in general)?
I never said I was unwilling to help out
Doggedblues, I think you are the one who doesn’t get it.
TIME = MONEY
Every application takes time to get to grips with. If a user is frustrated because of a lack of documentation or support, s/he will see their effort as a waste of time and give up.
The original poster was right about the need for the “OSS mentality” to change.
I’ve been a part-time OpenOffice user since StarOffice was a free download from Sun. It’s good to see the OpenOffice team releasing updates. Download will have to wait for T1 access though – would take forever over my puny phone line. Perhaps they should consider doestributing an OpenOfficeLite? It’s hard to have a download product that competes with a commercial product that fills two CDs…
I do use Microsoft Office under Windows on my main computer, and will have to continue doing so until: 1) my boss stops using the TrackChanges and other complicated MS features 2) OpenOffice adds something comparable to Publisher. Also, it could be my imagination but the OpenOffice apps seem weak compared to Microsoft’s PowerPoint and Excel.
Best Wishes,
Bob
Would seem like the IRIX version been updated, fair number of sgi commits in that changelog š
Laurens,
The thing is I do not care if somebody gives up. Let them use whatever they are happy with. If they are happy using Microsoft Office, let them use that.
I will explain to them what I see as some of the problems associated with proprietary file formats, but if somebody does not see this as an issue, then who am I tell him/her what to run?
People fail to see that I do mention alternatives. I told Crahan to try Lyx and Koffice in Mac OSX. I just think that if you do not like the alternatives, and cannot contribute in any meanigful way, there is no sense in complainging.
The OO.org developers would love to have a native version for the Mac by now. There just isn’t the manpower to do it at the speed that people want it. So people can do one of two things, help or hire someone to help. Complaining or denigrating the work that is given to you as labor of free love does not help.
I will say that at least Crahan seems to be willing to test binary builds and that is already a start. Most users, however, have this give-me-give-me mentality as if somebody owes them anything.
Finally, I will say use whatever meets your needs, but be honest about your needs. For me, I use joe or pico most of the time. They are very minimalist and allow me to grep for the content of what I have written very easily. When I need formatting I use Lyx, when I need to send in a widely readable format I use either text or PDF.
When I do a presentation, I export it to html or Flash and put it on my web site. There are always choices you can make. Assess your needs and use whatever meets those needs.
If an OO.org port is essential to your live, organize with other users, create a developer’s fund. If 5000 users each give $5 a month, you can hire quite a few developers in many parts of Asia for that money. Do something, do anything, just don’t simply complain.
The front page still mentions 1.1.1rc3. Look here for the download:
http://download.openoffice.org/1.1.1/index.html
Now I hope this is, indeed, 1.1.1 final I’m downloading. š
Anyway, kudos to the team. Great software. I love Writer.
My only real complaint is the lack of object linking(as in Object Linking and Embedding). You cannot put a live link to a Calc worksheet in a Writer document, Writer always creates a copy. In other words: you have to manually synchronize worksheets if you’re working with a separate spreadsheet. This is a serious deficiency. Not serious enough to put me off using OOo, but definitely a show-stopper for some people. I hope this gets addressed soon.
Keep in mind that MS Office did not appear from under the table, it took many people, time and money to build. It is more than 10 years old.
Which means that:
a) OO won’t replace MS Office in no time.
b) OO’s people are doing a Titanic effort mostly for free.
c) v1.0 is rubbish compared to v1.1 in load times, stability etc.
OO is good enough for many people, and most important is free. Version 2 looks very exciting.
But we all should keep in mind that for many, MS Office is still ok, they have already paid for it, and for some it even does things OO doesn’t do yet or that OO doesn’t do very well.
So keep credit where it is due. For the people that complain about “fix it yourself”, what do you expect to hear from people which work for free and get critizised for it?, get real, if OO doesn’t suit your needs do not use it.
Cost is really a moot point since the majourity of people are more than comfortable to pirate a copy or use a public computer that has it already; eg public library or school lab.
People *DO* care about who uses OOo since MS Office is a huge anchor tying people to Windows, switching them to OOo makes it easier for them to switch to Linux which is something *MANY* people want (personally I dont give a fu…freckle, but thats IMHO), there for anyone who wants widerspread desktop for Linux MUST care about what Average Joe thinks of it.
However there are many OSS people who don’t care about anything but what works for them. Why do they bother talking though? If they don’t care then why do they care to respond?
Anonymous (IP: —.cable.ubr05.newt.blueyonder.co.uk)
And what really is the problem with that anyway?
Nothing really, but if you’re going to say that OO.o is a suitable replacement (or even better than) MS Office, you shouldn’t respond with ‘stop whinning and fix it!’ when they start pointing out its flaws. People aren’t necessarily complaining about speed/functionality in OO.o as much as merely responding to zealots that are standing on rooftops singing its praises. I see it almost everytime any sort of MS Office comes up – somebody jumps in and yells “USE OPEN OFFICE!” With that kind of mentality, you should expect some criticism. And if you don’t want that kind of criticism, you need to figure out how to shut up the evangelists.
CraHan
doggedblues, so you are saying no one has the right to complain about an open source project because it’s free?
Only to those who claim it is better than xyz. Personally, I don’t think you should complain to the developers if the project sucks, unless they happen to be tooting their own horns. If that is the case, then it’s fair game
By CaptainPinko (IP: —.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com)
People *DO* care about who uses OOo since MS Office is a huge anchor tying people to Windows
Not really .. unless you need to run something that doesn’t currently work in Crossover, and assuming you can put up with the horrible fonts in CO
I just finished the build yesterday and 1.1.1rc3 is ALOT faster than 1.0.3.
1: Download 1.0.3 distribution and install all the programs as they are needed for building as well.
2: Install the August 2003 gcc update and switch to 3.3 as the main compiler.
3: Install X11 SDK and Java 1.4.1 SDK.
4: Checkout the code from CVS; I used cws_srx645_ooo111fix3 as it appeared to be the newest available last Saturday.
5: Follow the directions given on the Mac development stage. Before running the tcsh or sh script, edit it to correct non-settings in the ENVCDEFS variable:
-DBUILD_OS_MAJOR=10
-DBUILD_OS_MINOR=2
BUILD_OS_REV=8
I have 10.2.8 but you can put the panther settings in instead.
dmake and wait about 24 hours on a 1Ghz Mac…
Run the install as documented.
I veered off a bit by doing a ./setup -net so I could save local space. If you do that, you need to make a symlink between the program directory in the user OpenOffice dir and the main install program directory. If you don’t do this, “Start OpenOffice.org” program can’t find things for some reason.
One additional item you might want to do is copy the 1.0.3 truetype fonts to the 1.1.1 truetype directory so you get more fonts.
I’m hoping the true 1.1.1 MacOS release will deal with the fonts issue and tweek “Start OpenOffice.org” so it can properly start on a Network install layout.
1.1.1 is ALOT faster than 1.0.3 and has tons more goodies. Printer options are still weak but hopefully that can be worked on for 1.2 or 2.0.
Well, I won’t be migrating or using, Office 97 and up is just enough for anybody. Why would anyone want to move from incompatibility and just plain problems to Open Office Junk?
So when are they going to fix the most obvious bug of them all? The bloody gigantic speed problem! Ffs. OO is even slower than office XP on a pentium 90 ..
As read on on http://ooo.ximian.com/planet/ :
Dang, we used to have Utomo pre-releasing OOo releases, now we have Eugenia of OSNews.com doing it. It has not been released yet; it should be tomorrow, provided the mirrors are syncāed.
Yes, it will still have āboringā icons (these are Sun builds) – pretty icons come with Ximian builds, or even Fedora builds. And yes, we do have OOo 1.1.1 for OS X actually; weāre just not releasing it as we lack a support structure with the possible amount of questions that will arise. CraHan wants an updated webpage? Easy to talk, why not join the porting team And to those wanting Aqua-ified OOo for OS X, Neoffice or something will work (mostly).
For once, can we have an official release announcement from Louis for instance, without someone else blowing their horn?
I run OO 1.1.0 it runs fine on my machine. It never uses a high CPU percentage, which can make it feel a little slow at times, but generally I have no problems with speed on my 700 Cele laptop.
Hi
Speed improvements are definitely visible when moving from 1.0 to 1.1 or further
regards
Jess
I would like to say to the OO.o team:
Way to go – You guys kick ass!
Since OpenOffice (NeoOffice) IS THE ONLY UNICODE OFFICE SUITE available for Mac OS X, it is rather boring to read all the comments about alternatives, such as Microsoft Office for Max OS X. MS Office v.X is useless for the majority of international Mac users, since it does not support Unicode. This is the reason why I use NeoOffice. I would hereby like to express my gratitude to the OOo & Neo developers. You have made my life tolerable using a Mac in a truly international office environment.
B U T : What is the most disturbing fact about Mac OS X and the whole issue about Mac and Mac-office-tools, is the fact that Apples own flagship office application, AppleWorks, is still based on the ancient 10 years old code from ClarisWorks and is totally useless for those of us who need Unicode application for doing their every day office work.
This is pathetic. Apples own flagship office suite is completely dead in development. Dead, coma. What Apple international customers get when they buy a brand new Apple computer, with a band new unicode Unix operating system, is a 10 years old non-unicode carbon office app that just recently got a support for a wheel mouse! Get it ? 10 years old, carbon app on a band new Unix operating system ! Now, thats what I call the speed of evolution, or Darwinism in action!
The german magazine Ct ran a test in the recent issue on word processors. The emphasis of the test was to be able to handle big documents with lots of footnotes, pictures … you name it, the standard case in scientific work and serious text processing.
To sum it up, Word basically got one of the worst places with the usual problems which havenĀ“t been fixed for almost a decade now.
The funny thing is, that the biggest stability and the least problems, had:OpenOffice, Textmaker and a DTP program.
I think that OpenOffice.org1.1.1 is excellent and the developers should be thanked for doing a wonderful job. Not everybody can afford the ridiculous prices that Microsoft charges for MS Office, with its very restrictive EULA, while OOo1.1.1 is free to download and install on as many machines as one wants.
OpenOffice.org1.1 has amazed me with its abilities; Writer, for example being able to handle DTP work with ease, and its database capabilitites are a revelation!
No, OpenOffice.org1.1 and 1.1.1 do not have MS Office’s polish, but people seem to forget that you are paying a very hefty premium for MS Office, so it should be pretty fanastic, but then so is the latest version of Wordperfect.
For us ordinary mortals who aren’t into the finer points of macro generation and VBA, OpenOffice.org1.1.1 will more than suffice until version 2 is ready, which, from looking at the details looks to be a definite winner, with a relational database and Outlook equivalent at long last.
For those who would like an affordable alternative to MS Office but who don’t like star office 7/Openoffice, have a look at this:
http://www.ability.com/v4/index.php