Mac/Aqua port - state of the union

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Friday, 18 Apr 2008

Mac/Aqua port - state of the union

Philipp Lohmann

Roughly a year ago Sun joined the Macport community. The goal we - meaning the macporter team which Sun was now part of - set ourselves was that the Aquaport should be on par with the other OpenOffice.org platforms by the time of OOo 3.0 beta -which is now almost upon us. Being on par would have meant that the feature set of OpenOffice.org works as on the other platforms, but no extra system integration would have been done.

So did we reach that goal ? Mostly yes. There are some things that do not work yet:

Printing Documents with multiple paper formats (e.g. Insert->Envelope). This is mostly due to the fact that the Cocoa print system does not allow that, we'll do that by splitting one print job into several jobs.
No SDK yet. This was broken by the recent three layer office change and does not work yet.
No Netscape plugins.
No language packs. Currently the languages have to come with the office installation.

Most of these issues will be addressed until 3.0 Final.

In contrast to this we have achieved a lot of system integration tasks in addition to the necessary basics (in no particular order):

Native file picker
Native print dialog
Quicktime integration
System dictionary integration
Spotlight integration
Mac special font handling (what hdu likes to call "fancy ligatures")
lots of smaller things like the black dot in the close button or using the system's recent items menu

All in all I think we now have a really usable OpenOffice.org/Aqua version that does not need to fear being compared to the other platforms. There are of course still bugs. Like on all other platforms ;-)

tags: mac openoffice.org

Posted by Philipp Lohmann on 18 Apr 2008 | PermaLink |

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Comments

Shaun McDonald said:

I thought that Netscape was dead and gone?

Posted by Shaun McDonald on April 18, 2008 at 10:26 PM CEST #

sven said:

great job, i use mac port dev releases in daily work and it is surprisingly good!

but is there any hope that OOo will respect user setting for highlight colour (it is currently black, whatever your setting) and keyboard shortcuts for editing text (option+arrow moves to the end of the line, alt+arrow moves one word forward/backward)?

Posted by sven on April 19, 2008 at 09:20 AM CEST #

Ryan Mitchell said:

hello

agreed - the aqua port is starting to work brilliantly.

just wondering if there is a roadmap outlined? any thoughts on a visual refresh - the only gripe i now have is that the icons look very un-mac like :)

Posted by Ryan Mitchell on April 20, 2008 at 10:40 PM CEST #

Chris Cunningham said:

Shaun:

> I thought that Netscape was dead and gone?

"Netscape plugin" means "browser plugin based on NPAPI" (the "netscape plugin API"). This is still the modern standard for cross-platform browser plugins.

- Chris

Posted by Chris Cunningham on April 21, 2008 at 10:46 AM CEST #

PhilippL said:

sven: the support for these key functions is currently being implemented. The selection color is read from the system, just writer doesn't make use of it (which is the case on all platforms). I hope that at some point the applications all make use of the transparent selections that e.g. calc does in the meantime.

ryan: there is an update (came in with DEV300m10). Whether it's more "mac-like" I leave up to you ;-)

Posted by PhilippL on April 28, 2008 at 10:39 AM CEST #