Neooffice 2.1 Released

I tried to download but I got an error page. They must be slammed.

I'll give'em a try later.

nevermind.

How is this giong for everyone? I have played around with it quite a bit and am thinking about dumping Word and Excel in favor of NeoOffice. File compatibility is the only thing left holding me in the MS world of software (excluding Autocad LT).

I'm worried that a native Mac OpenOffice won't happen for technical reasons.

Check out this Slashdot post by Ed Peterlin, lead developer for NeoOffice:

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=233287&cid=18975159

Trust me, once any OS X port of OOo starts getting font handling and input methods correct, it'll slow down as well. This is true especially for Asian and other foreign languages. The bottleneck is in Apple's ATSUI and how it mismatches to the underlying OOo code. Has nothing to do with Java at all. Speed in a vaporware demo is one thing; carrying speed into a functional product is something different completely.

And if you think that, while Sun and OpenOffice continue to struggle to port OpenOffice to Mac, Ed and Neooffice will soldier on, this latest development should concern you:

http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=120&mode=thread&order=1&thold=0

Re: Open Letter to Jonathan Schwartz (Score: 1)
by vicjoe on Saturday, May 05 @ 02:07:23 PDT
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This is so depressing. The "send free beer" sounds to me like defeat in the face of irrational opposition. I've spent several hours reading threads at OOo and blogs, and there are a lot of people pulling for NeoOffice.

This is a crucial moment for people to step up to the plate ($$); as I understand it, there are a few bumps in the road, one being changes to the latest Apple iteration of Java that are challenging, there is no more OOo development of the X11 version, hence the newest code is no longer available to the NeoOffice team, and the announcement of Sun providing 2 full-time programmers to the OOo Aqua port will cause some expectant (naive?) users to withhold donations to NeoOffice (the OOo Aqua version will be Carbon, not Cocoa, btw). Fact is, Sun has made promises concerning the Mac platform before and has failed to deliver; also there is some kind of weird hubris among the OOo people, who seem to have marginalized NeoOffice, e.g. where the only link you can find in OOo pages to NeoOffice is from their Wiki.....

So there you have it. The future looks bleak for Mac office software users, unless KOffice 2.0 is successfully natively ported to OS X or the next version of iWork contains a spreadsheet program.

I think it's still too slow. Hopefully a native OpenOffice will improve this by not using Java. Interface elements still flicker too much and the launch time for new documents and the app itself is sluggish.

When you see how quickly Office goes on a Windows machine, all the word editing packages for OS X are disappointing. The only one that comes close is TextEdit. I use Pages instead of NeoOffice these days for text docs but on occasions I use NeoOffice for spreadsheets. Pages is slow too though. Appleworks is pretty speedy, I wish they'd get that kind of speed into Pages.

It feels a lot snappier on my machine... (intel1.83ghz)
I don't know what is your reference point, but on older machines it is incredibly heavy for a word processor program. Actually it is the heaviest application after Photoshop and demanding games :wow: that I have ever used.

oh it is, dont worry about it. have a look

http://images.google.co.uk/images?svnum=10&hl=en&gbv=2&safe=off&q=office+2008+mac&btnG=Search+Images

Oh, f*ckin' Gross! lol

Honestly, that's nowhere near the suck that is the Office 2007 interface. Unlike Office 2007, at least we'll still be able to use regular menus instead of the ribbon if we so choose. And those are just samples of the interface. We'll see. Don't throw it out just yet.

true, we'll have to wait and see. i just want it a universal version of office.

The only thing I don't like about NeoOffice is its startup speed.

I'm worried that a native Mac OpenOffice won't happen for technical reasons.

Check out this Slashdot post by Ed Peterlin, lead developer for NeoOffice:

Hmm, well, he should be very happy soon. (Sorry, I can't recall if that's been talked about publicly by Apple or not, so I'm going to be light on details.)

I used Neo Office (Word and Excel equivalents) for a whole week at my work. No exceptions. It was great adn speed was not an issue at all like some have suggested on my mini CD.

It lacks refinement but is an excellent Word Processor and Spreadsheet in place of MS Office if you want to run legal and not spend the cash.

I eagerly await future versions. KOffice would be great to have on the Mac natively.

I will say that NO Spreadsheet was a better substitute for Excel than NO Docuemnt was for Word while both were absolutely great.

Hmm, well, he should be very happy soon. (Sorry, I can't recall if that's been talked about publicly by Apple or not, so I'm going to be light on details.)

Thanks for telling us..um...I mean not telling us. ;)

Here's an excellent article on why OpenOffice on Mac has a long way to go:

http://cafe.elharo.com/ui/why-vrml-failed-and-what-that-means-for-openoffice/

Bill Gates also had a head start. Steve Jobs approached Microsoft before the Macintosh was released to port Microsoft Word to the Macintosh, they were very happy to after seeing what the Mac was all about. So it's not that they really understood it, it's just that MS-DOS wasn't so important, especially when compared to the Apple II, that they couldn't justify the small market share of the Mac, especially since it was an unreleased product at the time. Either way, Word on the Macintosh and eventually Macintosh Office became very large cash cows for the company so they could never justify just dropping it altogether.

OpenOffice.org has exactly one good thing about it: Open Document Format. I hated using it even on my PC when I had to, it's User Interface is pure crap, and I just hate having anything to do with it. It's slow, it's bloated, and it's like Java: You can run it anywhere (on computer operating systems) but it's just not very good at anything. I highly doubt even Sun's Mac port will be all that great, and Nisus Writer Pro Beta has been very good to me.

Sebastian

Well there's a new Word Processor is OS X land called Bean (http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html)

Does this help with either native OpenOffice or NeoOffice?

Good find... it doesn't support the Open Document Format though. It does default to RTFD which is good :D

Sebastian

I fail to see how Bean differs significantly from Textedit, with the exception of word count.

I'm guessing you're bound by an NDA and have probably said too much already.

Still, you've given me enough information to speculate as to what you were implying.

My educated guess is that Apple will abandon X11 in favour of a new application emulation layer (which will probably encompass an improved boot camp) that will enable X-Window apps written for Linux to run natively as OS X programs with little or no tweaking. That's the only logical conclusion that I can gather from your comment, since:

1) Apple, according to their M.O. has no interest in maintaining a native version of OpenOffice or taking over the NeoOffice project.
2) Better developer toolkits will have little or no impact on how well OpenOffice or NeoOffice run sufficiently on Mac.
3) OpenOffice's code base makes it difficult to port to OS X.
4) FreeBSD already includes a Linux emulation layer. Apple will most likely leverage that existing work and add its own technologies on top of it.
5) Apple has put very little work into X11 for the last few years, essentially allowing it to stagnate.
6) Apple wants to sell more Macs by allowing more existing software to run on it, expanding the universe of existing third party software.

Again, this is total speculation on my part.

Kickaha, I know you'll either confirm or deny the above in total silence. I understand and that's cool.

Hmm, well, he should be very happy soon. (Sorry, I can't recall if that's been talked about publicly by Apple or not, so I'm going to be light on details.)

To succeed in the Office space, you need a good Mac counterpart to your Windows suite.
Otherwise, you'll always remain a niche player.

Cross-platform apps that run well on Mac and have been accepted by Mac users:

1) Firefox (not perfect, slightly ugly and bloated, but totally usable)
2) NetBeans (few quirks, but otherwise, very Mac-like)
3) MPlayer

Cross-platform apps that run poorly on Mac, and because of that, have gained little or no traction:

1) Eclipse IDE
2) OpenOffice
3) Yahoo! Messenger

Surprise! :D While it's interesting speculation, it's not at all what I meant, sorry. :}

Ah, so you can't confirm rumours, but you can deny them... hmmmm.

If I were to use process of elimination, I could probably figure out what you meant 8-)

Hmm, well, he should be very happy soon. (Sorry, I can't recall if that's been talked about publicly by Apple or not, so I'm going to be light on details.)

Was this discussed publicly at the WWDC, or is this still under NDA?

Don't mean to speak for Kick, but it's my understanding that aside from the Keynote, WWDC is generally under NDA.

Kick... could it be this?

http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/visiting_the_apple_wwdc_2007

OpenOffice switching to Cocoa as Carbon is being depreciated.

Kick... could it be this?

http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/visiting_the_apple_wwdc_2007

OpenOpen office switching to Cocoa as Carbon is being depreciated.

Quote from the link above: "So what did we learn ? Well foremost: Carbon is a dead track, we really need to change our application to utilize the Cocoa framework. This will cause us quite an effort, especially since our native widget framework won't work with Cocoa. The reason is simple: unlike Carbon which has a themed drawing API with HIToolbox, Cocoa won't let us simply draw controls (buttons, menus and so on), so either we have not native look (completely unacceptable) or we use real native controls".

What is wrong with this picture... these guys are porting an app to the Mac and they didn't know this? Hmmm. How encouraging. :grumble:

Why can't they move to NeoOffice and work on something that is already working on the Mac?

1) NeoOffice's code is GPL and OpenOffice's is LGPL. GPL code cannot be migrated to an LGPL license. The code can move in the opposite direction, however. That is how NeoOffice came to be.
2) NeoOffice is a Java layer on top of X11 OpenOffice. X11 OpenOffice has been discontinued in favour of OpenOffice Aqua, a brand new project to port OpenOffice natively to the Mac.

So they are basically wasting time until the OOA makes the appearance on the scene?

The keep issuing patches to improve NeoOffice performance. I guess all they can do is stick it to Sun for killing their project by keeping their code GPL'd.

Can you elaborate on that some more (the sticking it to Sun and what happened there). I never got the send beer message they directed toward Sun on their website.

This seems to be an objective telling of the story:

http://neowiki.neooffice.org/index.php/History_of_NeoOffice_and_OpenOffice.org:_OpenOffic e.org

I just downloaded the latest patch tonight. It cut startup by 6 or seven seconds and a few other functions do seem snappier.

This is the first time I've seen at NeoOffice as being almost ready for prime time.

Yeah I saw a speed improvement at launch but then I tried the wizard and making new documents and they were slow. Pages still seems like a better program ATM, it just needs a spreadsheet component.

Well yeah, but iWork is $89. plus tax. NeoOffice is free.
As long as it's fairly competitive with the bigger guys, it's the better value. ;)

I'm now a happy iWork 06 user (due to my impatience with waiting for the next version... I'll at least qualify for upgrade pricing) and you know what, NeoOffice is a piece of s***!!! It's there as a last resort in case you're either a) Waiting for some other app to be released or b) You just can't afford another app or app suite and c) hate the X11 OpenOffice.org as much as I. I qualified for a and c before Friday.

Sebastian

iWork 06 makes you happy and NeoOffice sucks. :?: Do you use spreadsheets in your "work" environment?

Last time I opened iWork 06 it had two applications. One for making birthday announcements for my 3 year old neice called Pages and the other is a professional presenatation software I use called Keynote. Passed that, it sucks and does not warrant the "work" word being in the name.

NeoOffice is not bad at all and I gave up MS Office 2004 for a week to force myself to use it and I did great. It has it's quarks but works great.

Last I checked, NeoOffice is slow to open, annoying to use, and it's User Interface makes me want to gouge my eyes out. I'm waiting for iWork Next or Office 2008 before I bother with spreadsheets, but no I don't use them right now.

Oh and Pages COMPLETELY blows away NeoOffice/OpenOffice.org Writer. I thought it's word processing would be terrible, but it couldn't be easier to use.

Sebastian

You should check again. That was the point of my previous post.

NeoOffice was painfully slow, and a few months ago I would have agreed with your above post totally.

However with Patch 6 applied, it's not bad on my G4 and is quite competitive now on my Intel MacBook Pro. The user interface now has Mac icons and isn't much different from Office, so I don't get the problem there.

While an Apple solution will always have an edge in the UI department, NeoOffice isn't bad. The Writer component reminds me of Word 5.1 and the spreadsheet module is available now.

I just checked again, it's faster but still slow, there's still a stupid splash screen which I can't shut off, they still open a web page asking for donations every time I open it and nothing makes me want to not donate like bugging me about it, or making a crappy product for that matter. It's UI still makes me want to gouge out my eyes, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless their situation for a word processor was desperate.

Sebastian

Hmm, funny behavior?! I have never got the donation page you mention.
Although it is slow on first load, the speed is perfect afterwards. I use it mainly for work-related DOC files filled with tables that are screwed up big time by either pages or textedit (unfortunately). With respect to the UI: Not at all perfect, but I still like it way more than office with it's funny floating toolbar paradigm.

If not for screwed-up tables I would go pages-only, so I have good hopes for improved .doc importing in the new iWork.

It's quite normal for me. I open it so rarely that if it's not a patch it's a donation page. However one thing that I didn't try until tonight was moving an image from the Pictures folder into NeoOffice, I wanted to see how well it handled them while I was typing that previous post because I'm using more images in my documents now. It turns out it doesn't handle them at all, it might display one if one might turn up in a document through other means, but I can't drag and drop an image from the pictures folder into a document which just kills any hope of me ever using it right there.

Sebastian

Neo Office opens just fine on my 24" iMac, 1.83 CD Mini, and 2 GHz MBP along with all my G4 and 5 computers. It opens as fast as MS Office.

You don't use spreadsheets. There is the first problem that iWork has. No spreadsheet functionality and if you are waiting for Pages to deliver this, I think you will be disappointed.

Word processing? Really? I triple dog dare you to write a 140 page manual or document in Pages. I need a Table of Contents with it too.

Moving images in and out are no problem in Mac Office or Neo Office for me so I am not sure what to tell you there. Yes, the UI looks different because of the thousands upon thousands of iCons that have to be replaced. It is an alternative to Mac Office and a really good one at that.

From what you have commented it seems you are not in a typical work environment and that is fine. But my comments hold true. Pages is for making birthday announcements. iWork has no spreadsheet program and Pages is not considered a Word Processing program in the company of NeoOffice or Mac Office.

Nope, I really do need to because Spreadsheets are so great for numbers, but it's not that important at the moment. Just to clarify for future reference though, most of the work I do is on personal projects.

Anyways, I don't expect Pages to deliver this, but I do expect the next version of iWork to if Apple ever expects to do anything with it.

My current project could shoot up to be that large or larger though. I'm writing in it now and so far have around 10 pages (with a Table of Contents, but I only started yesterday and most of my time has gone into research). The way I manage the Table of Contents though is I tell the inspector to take all headings and subheadings, then I click the nice little Update Now button and it automatically generates. This quickly became my favorite feature because otherwise I just wouldn't have a Table of Contents.

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c370/King-KingdomHearts/Picture2-5.png

Pages is for a lot more than birthday announcements and I grow to like it more and more the more I use it. In fact all the past complaints I've seen about it not being enough of a word processor just don't make any sense. It's just different.

Sebastian

That was the same reason I stopped using it for Word Processing and I also get the donation popup regularly (it used to be the first two launches or something). These days, I rarely type a document with just text, there's always an image here or there and NeoOffice doesn't handle image positioning well at all.

I don't think Pages is limited to invitations and things but I probably wouldn't like to do a long document with it as it gets quite slow. My impression of Pages is that it's more like Indesign than Microsoft Word so they are for different purposes. A graphics designer wouldn't do a brochure design in Microsoft Word and an office worker wouldn't use Indesign to write a letter.

I hope Pages tries to do both but it needs to be leaner for office work and have spreadsheet capability (possibly in the form of Numbers).

I actually just wish Textedit had more features and better Word compatibility because it is fast for writing Word documents but it can hardly open any that were made in Office.

Yeah it'll probably get slower the longer I work with it. Documents themselves can get very large, it stores them in a package like applications, no compression at all. But it's really not less like Word than it is InDesign. It's just different with more layout functionality, but it handles all of the basics:

Tables
Charts
Lists
Paragraphs
Fonts
Colors
Comments
Shapes
Table of Contents

The only layout specific stuff is the column functionality, the ability to reorder pages with the thumbnails sidebar, styles, the way text wraps around an object (like it should in any word processor anyways) and the templates, and literally the only thing to throw me was that hitting return once already created a paragraph (where in any other word processor it's usually 2 hits).

Oh and Spreadsheets all around, just not in Pages though (where Tables and Charts is good enough for just Pages) because it already makes a brilliant fusion of Word Processing and Layout functionality.

TextEdit is strange... it's supposed to be a text editor right? It's not a text editor in any sense of the word. It offers some HTML and CSS features... but nothing that I would find in TextMate. It's more like a mini word processor than anything.

Sebastian

The web page only comes up the first time you open the app after an install or patch.

And even if it did come up every time, what would be the problem? The app is free! :?: