Since Microsoft, in its ultimate wisdom, decided to introduce Office 2008 sans VBA support, many Mac users have been left scrambling to find a new office suite. Apple’s iWork has its charm, but there’s also something charming about free. Very charming.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 has been released in final form. It is the first, honest to goodness, Mac OS X native version of the software. OpenOffice has got most anything you’d expect out of an office suite including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, graphics, formula and database capabilities. That’s more than most would ever need.
Even if it’s not, the system is extensible and one can easily add more functionality should the need arise. I went to their website to check out a few screenshots only to find that their site was running in a low bandwidth mode because of the popularity of this latest release.
If I hadn’t already purchased and fallen in love with iWork, I’d be seriously considering OpenOffice for my word processing and spreadsheet needs. It seems about time office software was free.
It's a huge improvement over the X11 interface. However, I still have a few gripes with it.
Firstly: There doesn't seem to be any way to make it remember my preferred initial location for new documents.
They are always created right in the middle of my screen.
Secondly: When resizing a window, it the re-draw of the window content is very choppy. I'd have expected more of an Aqua UI.
Finally: Quite a few of the features are in strange and totally unintuitive locations. For instance; it took me half an hour to figure out where I had to go in order to change the paper size of a document. Surely that should be inside Page Setup?
Native means Cocoa, or could it be something else like Carbon or even Qt?
Hi there,
Since I did a lot in the Mac native port, I think I can answer :-)
FYI, we use objective C++ and Cocoa, means we created an NSApplication for everything we could, the menus and everything is Mac native, you ocan believe me.
The last remaining part we have to migrate from Carbon to Cocoa are the controls ( buttons, checkboxes .. and so on).
Please notice "Carbon" does not mean obsolete : we use the most up to date Carbon part (no Quick Draw). And we build warning free (the real developers will appreciate)
Recently, I implemented the Apple Remote (will probably be in the 3.1), and OpenGL transitions, and this is the most up to date technology.
Hope this answers your question.
Last but not least, any volunteer is welcome :-)
Eric Bachard
For the curious, I put some builds there :
http://oooaqua.laurentbuisson.fr/
(search for DEV300_m30 )
-> do not use them in production !!