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Thursday, 03 May 2007

Sun Microsystems joins porting effort for OpenOffice.org for Mac

Philipp Lohmann

I'm excited to let you all know that as of now Sun engineering will add its support to the ongoing Mac/Aqua porting effort.

The MacOSX porting history is basically as old as OpenOffice.org itself. Practically from the start there was the plan to have a native version for Mac, however as a first step the community decided to produce an X11 port which - since OOo already had several X11 ports from the start - seemed to be a good way to get a version quickly as temporary solution. As usual the "temporary solution" tended to be quite long lived (year 2000 bug anyone :-) ?).

You can imagine my excitement when I first heard about renewed efforts to make an Aqua port reality. And now finally I can spend my paid time to add to this great effort. At first Herbert Dürr and I will contribute to the Mac port, however there certainly will be other Sun developers involved in their areas of expertise when the need arises (e.g. when problems with the build system arise).

Some may ask: Why is Sun joining the Mac porting project? If you look around at conferences and airport lounges, you will notice that more and more people are using Apple notebooks these days. Apple has a significant market share in the desktop space. We are supporting this port because of the interest and activity of the community wanting this port. The new invigorated effort in Mac/Aqua-porting (basically since CWS aquavcl01) is an obvious indicator. I think this is the right way to go to make OOo on Mac as good as or even better than the other ports. Add in the growing Mac community as a whole and suddenly from Sun's point of view Mac has a higher value since our strategy is to be multi-platform capable.

MacOSX and Aqua are quite new to me, so please bear with me as I learn about this (for me) exciting new platform at first. Certainly I will have many questions for my fellow Mac porters. However I can contribute ~10 years experience with vcl which I think the port can benefit from.

How do we want to proceed ? At first Herbert and me will try to get an overview about the current state of the work, which already has quite a lot of functionality thanks to the great work of the active Mac porters. I imagine that event handling and painting should be our first objective; Herbert specializes in Text drawing via SalLayout implementations and I will have a look at paint handling at first which I have heard on the mailing list needs to be improved and adapted to the specialties of the Mac platform and will need some support from the system independent layer of vcl (painting should be done mostly inside the paint handler). After that I could imagine that input needs to be improved e.g. for internationalized input as in input methods.

Let's make this port a great success !

tags: mac openoffice.org porting

Posted by Philipp Lohmann on 03 May 2007 | PermaLink |

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Comments:

Great news. I'm excited :-)

Posted by Chris on May 03, 2007 at 11:27 AM CEST #

What about working together with the NeoOffice-guys? They already ported OO to Mac (with Java). I think it's a mayour problem of Open Spource Projects... instead of working together to find the best solution for a broad range of users, everyone starts his own build (and maybe stumbles over the same problems).

Posted by X-Ray on May 03, 2007 at 11:39 AM CEST #

... and my mayor problem is my typing ;)

Posted by X-Ray on May 03, 2007 at 11:40 AM CEST #

nice *ggg*

Posted by 217.7.207.21 on May 03, 2007 at 12:52 PM CEST #

X-Ray: That would involve Sun's engineers working on two different code-bases, since the NeoOffice guys don't contribute changes back to OpenOffice.org and use a different license (GPL instead of LGPL). While this approach will be slower to get started it's smarter in the long term. It would be great to see old rivalries finally resolved and the two projects re-combine, though.

Posted by Simon Phipps on May 03, 2007 at 01:11 PM CEST #

How're you doing the port? Using Cocoa or Carbon? regards, Lars

Posted by Lars on May 03, 2007 at 01:14 PM CEST #

Currently the plan is to use Carbon.

Posted by PhilippL on May 03, 2007 at 01:34 PM CEST #

This is the best news I have heard in a while. :-)

Posted by Shaun McDonald on May 03, 2007 at 01:49 PM CEST #

Really great news!

Posted by Johan on May 03, 2007 at 02:47 PM CEST #

Brilliant news, I use Open office on both Windows and Linux, but on OSX it just 'feels' wrong (that's the designer in me!) cannot wait to get an aqua version other than NeoOffice. I'll be downloading as soon as an alpha is ready!

Posted by Martin on May 03, 2007 at 02:48 PM CEST #

Really great news. Open Office has also become even more interesting as it is run as a server side module in the new open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system Alfresco. Alfresco is supported on Mac OS X which is great. There it is used to read metadata from office docs and doing transformations like converting from Word/ODF -> PDF and RTF. Will this affect the X11-integration that is now used in Alfresco on Macs or does it open up for a completely new way of using OpenOffice in Mac OS X Server. Now the launch argument from the shell script looks something like this: /Applications/OpenOffice.org\ 2.1.app/Contents/MacOS/program/soffice "-accept=socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp;StarOffice.ServiceManager" -nologo -headless -nofirststartwizard &

Posted by Alexandra on May 03, 2007 at 02:54 PM CEST #

Thanks! Open Office is nice, but I _hate_ the MacOSX X11 port. NeoOffice is OK, but usually behind where OpenOffice is in features. I would love to have a native MacOSX version.

Posted by William on May 03, 2007 at 03:25 PM CEST #

You definitely must familiarize yourself with the NeoOffice project before you do anything else. http://neooffice.org. Don't be prejudiced. These guys do great work. I've used NeoOffice every day for years.

Posted by Wheat Williams on May 03, 2007 at 03:28 PM CEST #

This is fantastic! I've been waiting and waiting for a MacOSX Open Office. I've been using NeoOffice in the meantime, and quite like it. I firmly stand behind Open Office and ODF. I run a lab of about 16 computers, and I'm looking forward to installing OO on them. Thank you Sun...

Posted by N- on May 03, 2007 at 03:36 PM CEST #

This is good news, but I too would also see Sun and the NeoOffice developers working together. Seems to me you could save a lot of work taking this approach, and possibly come up with with product that's BETTER than Office, as opposed to largely mimicking it's functionality.

Posted by Anthony Mallory on May 03, 2007 at 04:13 PM CEST #

Good news. I have been using Neooffice for a while now. It hogs memory and response is too slow compared to OOo on linux. I hope a native port of OOo without the java layer as in NeoOffice would make it more snappy.

Posted by k1980pc on May 03, 2007 at 04:19 PM CEST #

Awesome news.

Posted by Regnative on May 03, 2007 at 04:21 PM CEST #

Will you be making all the supported apple plugins for leopard? Are any of you members of ACD? Have any of the developers (sun and others) seen the WWDC2006 or will be attendingWWDC2007?

Posted by Nehemiah on May 03, 2007 at 04:25 PM CEST #

I found a link to this page on a Mac-related blog (mac-essentials). After reading this great news there is nothing left to say but: I am totally amazed by these news! Thank you SUN for supporting the OO porters!

Posted by Patrick on May 03, 2007 at 04:26 PM CEST #

Working with the NeoOffice project or merging their codebase into yours would be a great way to go. One of the great benefits of NeoOffice, as it relates to Sun, is that it IS written with a Java layer. How great is that!! A high profile application running with java is great publicity for Sun. All of those "Swing is slow" myths could be tackled directly. Simon (Phipps), surely there could be a way to make this work. Maybe you could start by having the NeoOffice project people on an episode of your SDN podcast.

Posted by powerdroid on May 03, 2007 at 04:29 PM CEST #

Great news for all macintosh fans. NeoOffice is slow as hell, so a native port will free me from MS mac-office. Thank you

Posted by Ricardo Ramalho on May 03, 2007 at 04:37 PM CEST #

What would it take to help out with this project? Is it closed to Sun employees or will this be an open project?

Posted by Craig Callender on May 03, 2007 at 04:43 PM CEST #

As a pure speculation, I wonder if the people with a lot of experience programming Mac OS X and NeXTSTEP before that such as the folks at http://www.stone.com/ or authors like Aaron Hillglass might be willing to help you get orient to programming OS X

Posted by Todd Olson on May 03, 2007 at 04:47 PM CEST #

Philipp, Please take at least a brief stroll through the Apple Human Interface Guidelines
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/OSXHIGuidelines.pdf or http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/XHIGIntro/chapter_1_section_1.html
I'm hoping that the new Mac version can remove some of the oddness that I see in the OO Windows/Linux versions. I use open office on Windows and Linux (but not yet Mac because OO is too weird there), and develop software for Macintosh and Windows. So I'm a big fan of software that is cross-platform and yet feels natural to the typical Mac user (on a Mac), yet also encompasses the increasingly large middle ground where Win/Lin/Mac users can use each other's software. It just means removing little oddities (the OO "long click" is odd to most Mac and Win users, the Mac Finder's "really slow double click" to rename is odd to non-Mac users), and adding complete, visible controls so even inexperienced users can eventually find things. Good luck! I'm very happy to see this news.

Posted by Craig D Miller on May 03, 2007 at 04:49 PM CEST #

As a former employee of Sun and a Mac user, I'm glad to see this happening and am looking forward to this version of OOo.

Posted by Clair on May 03, 2007 at 04:54 PM CEST #

Whatever happened to the software company that Sun bought that made a neXtstep based office suite? Weren't they called Lighthouse software? That may be a good thing to opensource or give away for free. IIRC, it was pretty good back in the day.

Posted by matt evans on May 03, 2007 at 05:03 PM CEST #

Is there a release date set, or is it too soon? MS Office I love ya, but I'm not exactly happy with the price tag. ;-) Which kind of brings up another question. Since Apple is getting involved, what are the chances of having to pay for OpenOffice?

Posted by Kevin on May 03, 2007 at 05:03 PM CEST #

I too am excited about this announcement. There are a slew of interface integration and mac platform integration things that would be very nice. I am also excited that two Google Summer of Code interns are working on integration stuff - Aqua integration and address book integration. I'm a relatively recent newcomer to the mac and had used OOo quite a bit on the PC before switching and loved it. However, it is quite evident that OOo is not a native much of anything on the mac, except for the NeoOffice side project, which I just have never gotten into but have just gotten stuff done with MS Office 2004. Great work. I'm very glad to see this development.

As far as integrating the NeoOffice stuff, if you're not doing your work in Java and the Java/Cocoa bridge is deprecated and the licenses are incompatible, I'm not sure it makes sense other than to invite the NeoOffice folks to participate in the development and extend the olive branch. Otherwise, development seems like it would degenerate into mucking about with those issues and not getting stuff done - no offense to the NeoOffice people who did a good job with only a couple of people.

Posted by Jeremy on May 03, 2007 at 05:05 PM CEST #

Craig: This already is an open project, just Sun adds development resources. Please look at the mail archives of the mac porting list ( http://porting.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=mac ) Todd: Before running we should learn to walk; the application should be able to paint before we reconfigure its whole UI. Besides that is already on the list of the porting community team.

Posted by PhilippL on May 03, 2007 at 05:06 PM CEST #

Kudos, I think it is great that Sun is making a commitment to this effort, its been a long time coming. The only thing that I wish you would do differently is look at Cocoa vs Carbon. I would hate to see you do a bunch of work to make the port happen then midstream you find out that Carbon is being de-supported and then have things drag out because you have to switch to Cocoa which we know is the standard Apple is pushing for all new development work. I know this is probably a stupid question but does Carbon support Universal Binaries?

Posted by Rob on May 03, 2007 at 05:10 PM CEST #

Great news! But please don’t use Carbon. (MS Office is Carbonized, and you know you don’t want to be like them.) VoiceOver users are desperate for something they can use besides TextEdit. Accessibility comes for free with Cocoa! It is a PITA for Carbon (so much so, that Apple only made iTunes accessible with the last 7.1.1 release).

Posted by Access Curmudgeon on May 03, 2007 at 05:27 PM CEST #

To be honest, given how much my wife swears at StarOffice on Windows every time she uses it, I'd rather we fixed the problems there first and let the NeoOffice guys keep the market share they deserve, for the time being at least...

Posted by Calum Benson on May 03, 2007 at 05:35 PM CEST #

Great news - neo office is so slow on my iMac G5, hopefully something better can come from it.

Posted by Pete White on May 03, 2007 at 05:46 PM CEST #

Any idea on a release date - OpenOffice is great for windows/linux but its always lagged behind with integration in OS X.

Posted by TWO on May 03, 2007 at 05:48 PM CEST #

NeoOffice REALLY REALLY SUCKS. I can't wait for a native mac port.

Posted by Chris on May 03, 2007 at 05:53 PM CEST #

Great and really exciting. One caveat... as others have pointed out, please do development in Cocoa, particularly in light of the Mac OS X accessibility features.

Posted by charles Silverman on May 03, 2007 at 05:57 PM CEST #

> NeoOffice REALLY REALLY SUCKS. I can't wait for a native mac port. Yeah, the brilliant UI engineers at Sun, the people who brought you AWT and Swing, and who have zero experience writing UI code for the Mac, are going to do a better job than the guys who know the Mac inside out and actually have a native port working. Good luck with that. On the bright side, perhaps Sun could make changes to the core cross-platform code going forward to make the Mac port simpler.

Posted by Fuddy Fuddrucker on May 03, 2007 at 06:05 PM CEST #

good news! but i'm dubious too on the carbon choice... why carbon?

Posted by vabhe on May 03, 2007 at 06:16 PM CEST #

About Cocoa vs. Carbon:

Modern Carbon apps do get accessibility for free, it's the old Classic ports like iTunes that need to do extra work.
I might recommend Cocoa anyway because it will simplify your code going forward. The timeframe you're probably looking at is considerably post-Leopard, so I'd target 10.5, which simplifies your code even further.

Posted by Chris on May 03, 2007 at 06:18 PM CEST #

TH I S I S G R E A T ! ! ! ! I was using OpenOffice on Linux, Windows, Mac; but the Mac port didn't act like a "Mac app" :-( I just recently heard about, downloaded, started using NeoOffice. But it would be sweeeeeeeeeeeet if it were a native app! Is it ready yet? No? OK How 'bout now? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

Posted by jeff on May 03, 2007 at 06:52 PM CEST #

This is great news! But I have to really put my 2 pence in with the rest and question the carbon aspect??? really - please - really re-consider the use of cocoa.

Posted by Pilya on May 03, 2007 at 07:08 PM CEST #

Just take a walk up to your attic, dig out the Lighthouse Suite ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design ) there and you're done. If you can't find it just ask Jonathan Schwartz where he did put it. http://www.petitiononline.com/laafs/petition.html

Posted by iooi on May 03, 2007 at 07:22 PM CEST #

Thank you Sun! And, seriously, give Cocoa another look. You've got the resources to do it.

Posted by Taylor on May 03, 2007 at 07:23 PM CEST #

Awesome!

Posted by 129.64.9.108 on May 03, 2007 at 07:41 PM CEST #

What Sun should do is to go and buy Trolltech and rewrite this whole Star/OpenOffice GUI thing in Qt4 while getting all cross-platform for "free" and may be making Jambi official Java UI toolkit for Java 7 or 8. Otherwise MacOOO is a great news.

Posted by Sergei on May 03, 2007 at 07:47 PM CEST #

Re: the pro-NeoOffice comments. It's really unfortunate to see how this argument over "NeoOffice with a Java layer" versus a native Mac solution has become so problematic for the OOo community, especially because it carries so little meaning for end users. I accepted NeoOffice as a viable solution when I had no other option, and I thank the NeoOffice team for their efforts. I'm sure their team includes some very smart, committed people who worked very hard on this. But it seems to me that, in the rush by some to advocate NeoOffice for their own purposes, the user has been forgotten. Back up and see the big picture, folks. If OOo is going to be here to stay as a major player on the Office Suite scene -- given the software landscape as it exists in the real world and not in some utopian dream -- then several things must happen, chief among them: OOo absolutely must run natively on every major OS (at the very least, on Windows, Linux, and MacOS). My suggestion: Let the NeoOffice developers realize that users are not software developers; they don't care one whit about Java or the history of your development. They just want an app that is fully supported on their machine without bloat and overhead and missing features. I say, do the user community -- not the NeoOffice or Java-advocate community -- a favor and get behind the native Mac port and make it happen. It's the best thing for OOo long-term, and it will make Mac users everywhere -- including me -- very happy. It's about time this happened.

Posted by Duane on May 03, 2007 at 08:01 PM CEST #

It totally makes sense to use Carbon instead of Cocoa. To get any benefits from Cocoa, you have to use Cocoa for your entire application. If you have a cross-platform UI and just want to draw native Mac controls and include native Mac dialogs for printing, open/save etc., Carbon is a much better choice. Download Abiword to see an example of a cross-platform application ported using Cocoa. It's been really much work, e.g. all dialogs have been reimplemented as native Cocoa dialogs, so if the Abiword developers add a new dialog, this dialog won't automatically be in the Mac version. It must be recreated using Cocoa. For OpenOffice.org, which is so much larger than Abiword, this would be an unbelievably huge effort. And look at the result, even though Abiword has been ported using Cocoa, it doesn't really feel like a true Mac application. You immediately realize that it's ported. Cocoa is really made for new applications that are completely created in Cocoa. If you're porting an application and want to reuse as much code as possible, use Carbon. (And OpenOffice really has to reuse as much code as possible, because there aren't enough OpenOffice Mac developers to simply throw away the entire OpenOffice frontend and replace it with a new Cocoa frontend started from scratch.)

Posted by Helge on May 03, 2007 at 08:05 PM CEST #

Just another case of not invented here. NeoOffice seems plenty fast and capable to me. I think its the core OpenOffice suite that needs work before its usable. I periodically try using it and always have to give up. Recent pet peeves include: - No support for MS Word outline view. - I was trying to edit a big document with lots of comments and changes and custom styles. Open Office could view it surprisingly well, but broke down trying to edit it. Why waste the effort on another port if NeoOffice is good enough. Fix OpenOffice.

Posted by dm on May 03, 2007 at 08:12 PM CEST #

Hopefully NeoOffice and its team will be part of the effort. They have brought us a lot of functionality, and spent a gigantic amount of effort in doing so. Please don't turn this into a silly contest between teams or techniques.

Posted by Justin on May 03, 2007 at 08:15 PM CEST #

Duane - you hit the nail on the head!

Posted by TJ on May 03, 2007 at 08:16 PM CEST #

Yet another in a long line of Sun/OOo vaporware announcements of Mac ports. (And always coincidentally timed whenever NeoOffice has a big day in the sun….) Continually raising false hopes of “salvation” through a perfect Mac port delivered from on high is bad for Sun, bad for OOo, and terrible for Mac users. Show us the real end-user goods, or go home and keep quiet.

Posted by Smells like vaporware again on May 03, 2007 at 08:22 PM CEST #

That's great! Thank you, Sun :-)

Posted by Michal on May 03, 2007 at 08:34 PM CEST #

Im looking forward to this, iv long used open office on my home pc, and i recently switched to neooffice on my new 24in intel imac and it runs great, if OO can run even faster on my imac i might just have to convince my company (which is all apple based) to switch over from MS office.

Posted by Tony on May 03, 2007 at 08:37 PM CEST #

Great news! We've been patiently waiting for OOo for Macs... while NeoOffice has been great alternative, it does have its issues. Can't wait to see a beta of this!

Posted by Chris on May 03, 2007 at 08:49 PM CEST #

I hope that you will be using the Open Document Format (ODF) in the Mac OS X version also. Further, you may want to look at integrating TeX and MathML to provide support for math-intensive documents.

Posted by Viswakarma on May 03, 2007 at 08:58 PM CEST #

I completely agree with Helge - Cocoa makes absolutely no sense for this project, and would require a shift to Objective-C, which makes even less sense given the codebase of OO is in C++. It will be nice when people finally get that for the most part Cocoa sits on top of many Carbon calls (well, on top of Core)... That being said, the criticism of NeoOffice here is also very silly, They have done a great job, they have not "rewritten" the app in Java, and their Java layer is fairly slim and allows bringing the graphics layer over fairly quickly. Java is supported well on the Mac OS X (unfortunately not enough by Sun, which is maybe where they SHOULD be focusing), and showing a commitment to the NeoOffice team instead of a go it alone attitude would also show they eat their own dog food. To be honest, with the half promises by Sun of Mac products, and dropping the ball with Oh so many things (Java, KitchenSink née Watson, and previous open Office efforts, just to begin) I have little faith in this product. Mr. Lohmann, I would love to hear your comments regarding: 1. Cocoa Vs Carbon (as I said, as a programmer I see Carbon as a much more natural fit) 2. The Work Neo Office has done, and the use of Java, and joining them, and 3. Your honest assessment as to where this will go and a comment on previous Mac porting efforts, and especially Sun's commitment to the JVM on the Mac. Thank you for posting your blog.

Posted by Eytan Bernet on May 03, 2007 at 08:58 PM CEST #

Awesome news!! NeoOffice is great, but way too slow. I'm looking forward to a responsive version of OOO that uses the Mac GUI and my installed Mac fonts!!!

Posted by chris P on May 03, 2007 at 09:01 PM CEST #

Lighthouse sounds kind of interesting? Has Mr S never said anything about it publically? Anyone got his email address?

Posted by RJ on May 03, 2007 at 09:02 PM CEST #

The forward mapping of character codes to glyph codes and the backward mapping of glyph codes to character codes controls multilingual full phrase archiving and full phrase accessing of softcopy document solutions. In other words, the character-glyph mapping is the key to the document model, the document model is key to the server model, and the server model is key to everything. What character-glyph mapping model does OpenOffice support? Apple's extension model to TrueType 1.0: 1991 and Microsoft's extension model to TrueType 1.0: 1991 have different pros and different cons, and the issue is whether the developers of OpenOffice decide in favour of one or the other, or the developers of OpenOffice decide in favour of both for the benefit of the enduser. Said someone who wrote the review of QuickDraw GX in Scandinavia, and wrote commercial and non-commercial enduser documentation for the ColorSync 2.0 / ICC colour-colourant mapping model. With best wishes, Henrik Holmegaard technical writer icc abc Project

Posted by Henrik Holmegaard, technical writer on May 03, 2007 at 09:04 PM CEST #

Anyway I can help make this process go faster by contributing to this project? I'm tired of not having an Office Suite to use but there's no way in hell I'm using and most definitely NOT buying Microsoft Office for OS X. I have all 3 mainstream operating systems on the market (Linux, OS X and Windows XP) and I have to say I like my Mac a lot better than Windows and any other Microsoft product.

Posted by Seventeen Reasons on May 03, 2007 at 09:09 PM CEST #

Different Take I thank the guys over at NeoOfficeJ as the port has served many of us well while avoiding X11. That is a big deal when helping someone of marginal computer skills switch from a PC. Many Kudos to the NeoOffice J team and many thanks. To OO.org, thanks for all you have done until now, even NeoOfficeJ wouldn't have been possible without your efforts. To SMS, thanks for coming on board. I won't second guess your decision regarding cocoa/carbon, as I'm not the guy doing the work. I'm sure you have your reasons. Please, one request, make it universal from the start. As good as Rosetta is, I'm ready to put it behind me on major apps.

Posted by NoPCZone on May 03, 2007 at 09:17 PM CEST #

Dear Sun, Thank you. We appreciate your support and long standing commitment to the oo.o community. Justin ( digg gotcha : http://digg.com/apple/Sun_to_assist_in_porting_OpenOffice_to_aqua )

Posted by Justin Mason on May 03, 2007 at 09:57 PM CEST #

I've been using Star Office and Open Office since '99 and loved the Windows versions emmencly. Since I went Mac, I've been flipping between NeoOffice and Pages depending on what I'm doing. NeoOffice has kept me from buying MSOffice for Mac, but like many others here, I've just found it lacking. Now, I'm not a programmer or a developer. I'm just a user. And I don't care how they do it, just so long as it gets done. That said, if they have any sense at all, they should cooperate with the NeoOffice team because at least those guys and gals have been making the effort and I bet they have a thing or two to offer Sun and the rest of the OOo crew. Just sayin'

Posted by Jack on May 03, 2007 at 09:57 PM CEST #

Oh, how I love people developing exciting stuff for my beloved Mac!

Posted by Desh on May 03, 2007 at 10:07 PM CEST #

As Jack wrote: "Please, one request, make it universal from the start. As good as Rosetta is, I'm ready to put it behind me on major apps." And that pretty much sums up my previous comment about the user's experience. It's just time for a native OOo app on the Mac, without meaning any offense to all of you hard-working developers out there.

Posted by Duane on May 03, 2007 at 10:23 PM CEST #

Fantastic news! Well done, Sun.

Posted by Stacker on May 03, 2007 at 10:39 PM CEST #

Great news! It is amazing how great the response to this announcement is. It looks like it was the right choice :-) At the moment, GullFOSS has a page hit of 17795 (rising fast) on blogs.sun.com. That's awesome!

Waiting for a better alternative to either NeoOffice or OOo with X11,
-Bjoern

Posted by Bjoern on May 03, 2007 at 10:54 PM CEST #

This is great news!!! Good luck on the new porting effort. However, I beseech you to use Cocoa and not the creaking carbon. As an incentive any new Mac OS X features will be available for Cocoa for FREE which will make is slightly more future proof...:) Please targer Leopard and future iterations as this should make your code development easier. [quote] Whatever happened to the software company that Sun bought that made a neXtstep based office suite? Weren't they called Lighthouse software? That may be a good thing to opensource or give away for free. IIRC, it was pretty good back in the day. [/quote] I would like to second this. I wish Sun would open source Lighthouse's software coz they were developed on NeXtStep which means their software are all Cocoa by default. Am sure the community (GnuStep??) will pitch in and maintain the Lighthouse "office suite".Once again "GoodLuck!"

Posted by Jes on May 03, 2007 at 11:04 PM CEST #

Please consider integrating an email with the OpenOffice implementation for OS X so that we have a solution to the Outlook/Entourage compatibility problem.

Posted by Headphone Jack on May 03, 2007 at 11:25 PM CEST #

The people at Sun were not born yesterday. It is unreasonable to believe that they would be willing to commit resources to this project if they had not first carefully thought this through. Certainly Sun's bright engineers and managers have looked at NeoOffice and they have looked at the Carbon - Cocoa cost tradeoff. The Lighthouse Design (ironic perhaps that the current CEO of Sun was also one of the co-founders of Lighthouse) situation is a different story and is not relevant here. Lighthouse resurrection would not be worth it because Sun has clearly stated they are interested in applications that are cross platform. With Lighthouse code, they'd have to somehow move the old NeXTSTEP stuff into a code base that Mac OS X and Windows and Linux could all use. Such a scenario is very unlikely and too costly unless I've missed something and perhaps Apple has already come up with a way to do this ala iTunes which runs on both Windows and OS X but it strikes me as a maintenance nightmare. Sun already spent mega millions during the McNealy-Baratz era when they acquired Star in Germany in 1999. They then released parts of Star Office as OpenOffice. Where Sun screwed up years ago was that they had once promised to create an OpenOffice Foundation (akin to the highly successful Apache and Mozilla Foundations) but then their lawyers under McNealy-Baratz Fundamentalist Rule backtracked on that promise (the lawyers were too busy protecting prorpietary this and proprietary that, and expending Sun's energy suing Microsoft over Java licenses rather than focusing the company on innovation -- an unfortunate side effect of fundamentalism). Now there is hope. By making available a native port of OpenOffice on Mac OS X, Sun has the opportunity to leverage its investment of Star. It is now more clear than ever that Apple has been restored to full health and beyond. Apple is not just surviving, it is in fact thriving. Apple is gaining market share and its stock price busted past $100 a share a few days ago for the first time in its history. Today's investment by Sun in a native version of OpenOffice on Mac OS X is a less riskier bet than it was before. Mr. Lohmann has correctly stated that there is an increasing demand for OOo on OS X (market demand is always a great motivator). Oh and by the way, Wall Street values AAPL today with a market cap of about $86 Billion, which overshadows Wall Street's valuation of SUNW at just $18 Billion.

Posted by Tabitha on May 03, 2007 at 11:42 PM CEST #

I wouldn't get caught up in Carbon V. Cocoa, they both have their advantages and disadvantages. What I DO ask is that instead of just taking an X11 UI and jamming into Aqua is that you take a few months and talk to the folks at Delicious Monster, Omni, and Apple about designing a kick - ass *Mac* UI. There's this tendency outside of the Mac universe to think "Well, we can always do the UI last, it's the features that count". Do not fall for that trap, therein lies madness and hate mail. Lots of hate mail. Mac users CARE about UI, and they will refuse to use a product with a crap one, or even one that smells of bad port. Talk to the people winning the awards for UI. Talk to people like John Gruber of Daring Fireball.net. Make sure you include things like OSA/AppleScript support so that the Automator community can tie into your work and do things with it you'd never think of. Support the Apple technologies and design considerations in OO, not because it wins you points in checkbox contests, but because that's how you design a great Mac application. If all you care about is "good enough", then why even bother? Great man. That's always the goal: Great.

Posted by John C. Welch on May 03, 2007 at 11:50 PM CEST #

to the guys who will port OpenOffice to mac: GOD BLESS YOU!!!!!!!!!!

Posted by iwashere on May 03, 2007 at 11:53 PM CEST #

Great news indeed! I've switched to a macbook pro after using products from micrsoft for 14 years now (from win 3.11 on) and after giving the last 2 years B2B & B&C support to customers using these produkts. I must say that I don't really wan't that kind of stress in my free time. The only thing connecting me to microsoft is office for mac and my pda... ;) greeting d3m0n

Posted by d3m0n on May 03, 2007 at 11:53 PM CEST #

Ok, we've heard this before. You've burned through your karma with the previous trial balloon announcements. The technical and business rationale issues that have buried Sun's previous "efforts" on an Aqua port haven't gone away.

What makes this effort any more real than before? What is Sun bringing to the table to prove that they're not full of it?

Posted by cmholm on May 03, 2007 at 11:58 PM CEST #