[KLUG Advocacy] OpenOffice and Mac

[Adam Williams]

> penOffice is a great product.  It will not get much acceptance in
> the Mac community right now though.  One thing that Mac users are
> rabid about is consistancy of interface.  When you run a Mac program
> it needs to look like a Mac program.  This is a HUGE failing for
> OpenOffice on the Mac.  OO on the Mac is just butt ugly (not that it
> wins any design awards on other platforms either though).  For PC
> users ugly works as long as it is usable but not on a Mac.  

I haven't seen OO on the Mac, as I don't have one around.  What I really
don't understand is why Apple doesn't step up to the plate;  I can't
believe that Apple is confortable depending on M$-Office.   But Apple
does many things well;  but foresight and openness has never been their
strong suit.

Just glancing at http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/11x11.png doesn't
look to bad; but again I don't know anything about Macs.

Personally I think Ximian's OpenOffice on XD2 looks VERY nice. 
Certainly as good or better than M$-Office looks on the Win9x box one
cubicle over.

>From http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/timeline.html -
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"What's holding back the Quartz and Aqua tracks?
To implement Quartz and Aqua, we will need to change APIs that are owned
by different projects here at OOo, and the one we really do need to
target is undergoing a major revamp (Toolkit2). These changes will
affect all platforms, so we are working with gsl to get the hooks we
need to complete a native port.

Aside from our compilation efforts, the majority of our work can't be
completed until these APIs are in place or at least designed to a point
where we can begin figuring out how to marry them to MacOS X. There is
no active coding at this time. With limited testing and development
resources, it is unwise to spend all of our efforts porting a "dead" API
that would not allow our work to be incorporated into newer versions of
the software. As such, any delivery estimates here should be considered
"relative" to the time the APIs are completed.

All further development of the Quartz and Aqua tracks has been postponed
until OpenOffice.org 2.0 due to gsl timeline. Initial delivery of 2.0
for Win32, Solaris, and Linux x86 expected in Q1 2005. Projected OS X
X11 port availability expected to be Q2 2005. Projected OS X native
availability of OpenOffice.org 2.0 is currently Q1 2006."
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> It is a big shame that OO is using the X11 look for the Mac version. 

Or it is a shame that Apple took off down a proprietary road instead of
just using and refining established technology.  But thats a whole
different argument.

> OSS application software should also be ported (as much as possible)
> to as many platforms as workable, including Windows!!!  

Completely agree.

> When people
> start using OSS software on Windows and get use to it the transition
> to a non-M$ platform is all the easier.  Most often the battle for
> software mindshare is won not on technical excellence but in
> marketing and most importantly critical mass (spelled lots of users
> using it).  Critical mass can be most easily won by cross-platform
> ports and usability.  Windows may not be loved but it must be played,
> at least for a time, to be conquered!  And Mac support, true Mac
> support, is a huge help on the road away from M$ as well.  Then it is
> an easy step to put people into SuSE (Novell??) Linux on the desktop
> and server!

There is the GTK-OSX project (http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net/) but again
it seems to lack gas.  GTK is built on glib whose focus is portability
which is how so many GTK apps also run on Windows (and other
platforms).  We use several GTK (GNOME) apps on Windows in production
and it really does work well.

Part of this I think stems from the small (and diminishing?) technical
Mac community.  Off hand I can't think of a single developer I know who
even owns a Mac.  IMO the best thing Apple could do it junt down
prominate Open Source developers and GIVE them a Mac (like thats going
to happen).