Filed under: Software
MacDevCenter on NeoOffice/J
One of our recurring points of discussion here at TUAW seems to revolve around the age old question: If not M$ Office, then what?. Well, Matthew Russell over at MacDevCenter has put together a pretty good answer to that question with What Is NeoOffice/J (and Can It Replace MS Office): "NeoOffice/J is the long-awaited Mac-friendly version of OpenOffice. This open source project provides Mac users with most of the functionality of Microsoft Office, but for free. Is NeoOffice robust enough to serve as your only office suite in a Microsoft-dominated world? Matthew Russell explores. Plus, an in-depth interview with its lead developer, Patrick Luby."It's a rather thorough 2-page introduction to this Microsoft Office alternative followed by a 3 page interview with Patrick Luby, NeoOffice's Lead Developer. I especially like the list near the end of page 2 noting why someone who already owns Office should take a look at NeoOffice/J. The best answer in the list: "When Microsoft products crash, it reminds you of the days when you used Windows."
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Bob said 2:39PM on 8-12-2005
Is there any Mac equiv to Access? I mean, other than File Maker?
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Jason said 3:13PM on 8-12-2005
I'm sorry, but even if OOO is a poster child of the open-source movement, I refuse to use it on my mac until it is good, which it is not. The NeoOffice guys have done a very good job of taking OOO and making it decently mac-like, but when it takes five minutes to open up on my month-old powerbook, I cannot use the software. They are separate apps, not one application, even if they are a suite - and so they should have different icons in my dock.
Office 2004 is simply more polished and well-done, and until OOO is better than Office, I'll continue to use it. Besides, Office 2004 has a killer feature that I LOVE and that will be even better when I get to school in a few weeks - the ability to record audio and line it up with notes that I'm taking so that i can correlate what I was typing when my professor was speaking.
Jason
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Penginkun said 3:33PM on 8-12-2005
Jason, NeoOffice/J takes five MINUTES to load on your PowerBook??? My year-old iBook loads it more quickly than that!
Part of NeoOffice/J's problem (and the main reason I don't care for it) is that it's Java-based. It works reasonably well, but Java's performance is sluggish at best.
I wonder if Apple would consider sponsoring a port of OOO to Cocoa?
mmm...cocoa... 8^)
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Berklee said 5:16PM on 8-12-2005
I agree, I used NeoOffice for my thesis. I started it on a PC with OpenOffice, and finished it on my PowerBook. The speed difference between my 700Mhz P3 Dell and my 1.33Ghz PowerBook is astonishing: the Dell wins.
I don't want to knock NeoOffice, they did a FANTASTIC job in porting it, I also used the "official" port that needs X11, and that was a lot worse. But compared to the recently released 2.0 OpenOffice Beta for Windows, NeoOffice just doesn't cut it. I'm now looking into either AbiWord or Pages for my word processing needs.
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froopyloot said 5:31PM on 8-12-2005
I like OO.o I used Star Office on Linux for a while. It is definitely not as feature rich as MSO but I think in time it will catch up. As for the port, as soon as the Mactels start hitting the shelves ports like these will be no problem. ASAIK the impediment for porting OO.o to the mac has been the programming language. The developers were not able to easily recompile the source for PPC. Thus the reason JOffice exists. It runs in java, and java is mostly platform agnostic. This is also the reason JOffice can be slow. There are some great alternatives for word processing out there. Mellel office is a nice one. Pages is ok. I like TextEdit... seriously, it has all the features I need. (I do like MSO's record feature in the note taking app, that is cool.) I do wish there was a good replacement for Excel.
~m
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Patrick Wynne said 6:30PM on 8-12-2005
"Part of NeoOffice/J's problem (and the main reason I don't care for it) is that it's Java-based."
Penginkun, I suggest you read the NeoOffice/J FAQ. Or, hell, I'll just post the relevent section here:
"So...is NeoOffice/J written in Java?
No.
NeoOffice/J is a Mac OS X native version of OpenOffice.org that uses small amounts of Java code for graphics drawing and configuration.
OpenOffice.org is written primarily in platform-agnostic C++. However, NeoOffice/J takes advantage of Mac OS X's advanced Java integration to tap into the Mac OS X look-and-feel. In other words, the "J" in NeoOffice/J primarily has to do with operations that affect how the application appears to the user. The "guts" of the office suite are written in C++. (The code that makes up NeoOffice/J is 99% OpenOffice.org code shared among all OpenOffice.org platforms and 1% Mac OS X-specific code in Java, C++, C, and Objective-C.)
Thus NeoOffice/J will only run on Macintosh computers running Mac OS X 10.2.x, 10.3.x or 10.4.xnot on Mac OS 9, Windows, Linux, Darwin, or any other form of UNIX."
Though I completely agree it would be very cool if Apple could port OOO to Cocoa.
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Penginkun said 11:50PM on 8-12-2005
Well, that's what I get for listening to my OSS nutball friends, and not reading the FAQ. 8^)
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Wheels said 12:11AM on 8-13-2005
I tried NeoOffice and was less than impressed with it's performance; I thought the Java interface made it lunky and clunky, and I also didn't like the fact that the different aspects of the suite couldn't be ran separately.
As long as we're plugging word processors, I put my vote in for Nisus Writer. It's not free, but I find that it's worth the price.
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Ian Charles said 12:42PM on 8-13-2005
"When Microsoft products crash, it reminds you of the days when you used Windows."
Strange, i have never had Word or Excel crash on me... Well no more than say Safari.
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Adam Moore said 12:08AM on 8-24-2005
I thought after reading these comments I would answer some of the concerns and issues.
>>Is there any Mac equiv to Access? I mean, other than File Maker?
With NeoOffice not yet, but if you use x11 you can use OpenOffice 2.0's new base program.
>>five minutes to open up on my month-old powerbook
I think this was due to a limitation of Java 1.3 in Apple. NeoOffice is currently being ported to Java 1.4 and there has been a noticeable speed improvement.
>>As for the port, as soon as the Mactels start hitting the shelves ports like these will be no problem.
Unfortunately this is false. It is not a trivial task to move from wintel to mactel. Rosetta doesn't work with embedded java so they can't use that. Ask a developer about the difficulties of moving over.
>>Though I completely agree it would be very cool if Apple could port OOO to Cocoa.
Please send your letters to them. We would like to see their help too I think it can benefit them and their users tremendously.
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