Edited by author 06-30-2003 08:46 PM
Nothing to be seen here.

Your warez'd copy of Office X has much better installer and widgets, move along.

Seriously, Openoffice is great! My fiancee uses it full-time. She is a heavy windows msoffice user at work and has had no real complaints shuttling excel and word back and forth. Once we switched to the apple X11 implementation it has %90 of the speed you would want.

I use Openoffice at work on windows/linux all the time as well and haven't had any issues emailing docs back and forth (sigh). Peterlin and the other guys have worked hard at this and I'm really looking forward to neooffice coming online maybe later in the year(?). My biggest dissappointment with Apple has been their failure to assign even a 2-3 engineers to help out, it's ridiculous.

OK, so most of my Unix experience was 13-14 years ago writing all my high school papers in VI. I'm getting ready to start downloading this right before I leave work tonight. Is this going to be a huge pain in the butt to install in the morning if I don't know much about Unix? And is it worth the learning curve to avoid putting more MS crap on my machine?

As a sidenote Nisus Writer uses open source coversion routines from AbiWord. Which is nice.

OOo, I'm the Marketing Project Lead there, Hi. We never pretended that this was anything other than an X11 release for experienced 'Unix Savvy' users. All our literature on OS X tries to put this over, we're mad keen OS X users ourselves and really want a fully native port, it's just not quite there yet. If you can help then we really, really need you.

To check out the state of progress of the native port have a look at NeoOffice.org. It's a technology testbed for the OpenOffice.org OS X community. There's also a version of 1.0 that uses Java instead of X11, it's er, interesting. If you've got any more questions google my name and I'd be happy to answer them.

There IS a version of OpenOffice with "OS X-native widgets" in the works. It's really a lot more involved than you might think though...

The current version of OpenOffice is written for X11, the UNIX windowing system (yes, I'm over-simplifying). Since OS X is built on a BSD UNIX clone, porting OpenOffice to OS X isn't really that tough, you just have to make sure X11 is there and rejigger a few things.

A more "Mac-like" version of OpenOffice would talk to Quartz instead of X11, and that is in the works. It's a major undertaking.

After THAT is finished, then the programmers can redesign OpenOffice to provide a more Mac-like user experience. That's a really major undertaking that might be better left to Apple.

so anyway, a version of OpenOffice that anyone besides a UNIX geek would want to use is still a year or so off. I'm not put-off by the software, in fact I'm quite impressed by their work to date... but that installer... sheesh. In the meantime, I'd suggest looking at Nisus Writer.

I expect that at some point, Apple will get involved in this and throw a few engineers at it like they did with KHTML. In fact, given the amount of work they did on KHTML months before telling anyone about Safari, they may already be doing this.

Cowboy X, I was very unimpressed with the linux installer.
I untared everything to a directory. That's good enough to
install my browser (phoenix, from the nightly builds). Why
do anything more? But no, it looks installed, then I run it
and it does the full-screen shaded-blue thing of a Windows
installer. Yuck. I have a huge monitor so that I can have
lots of windows open at once and be able to let things run
their course while I do something else. I don't think looking
at an installer window is fun, productive, or reassuring.

The installer for this mess of software is inexcusably horrible.

Aaaauuuuggghhh. Developers, why is it so hard to use native widgets? If I wanted to run OpenOffice on X-Windows, I'd get Linux and save the money.

Edited by author 06-30-2003 11:44 AM
Not much.

As long as people are getting windows pre-installed with their PC and have to use it at work, that is what they will be using.

I remember back in '97, when CompuServe was still around, I had this discussion with a group of people. It was Netscape vs. IE and many many people where telling me that "Well if people can install Netscape, they always will."

I didn't agree with that, my argument was: No, if the Browser comes with the OS 99% of the people won't change it, they don't care.

And guess what: I was right.

And the same thing will hold true for OpenOffice and Linux. Until people are forced to work with it (at work) they don't care, as long as they can do what they want they won't be complaining or changing.

The net sure has changed over the past 10 years I am on it, and not always to the better.

So, what happens when there are full stable office suites for windows and mac, and an easy to install, stable and usable free gui/os for windows?

Is it going to change anything?