May
09
Apple’s notebooks have become increasingly popular. OpenOffice.org does run on Apple’s MAC OS X operating system However it does not comply with the OS X user interface, called Aqua. Sun Microsystems has now decided to commit two full time developers to produce a full MAC OS X compliant port of OpenOffice.org.
Even among the geeks at recent BarCamp Boston 2 it seemed they had gained a majority. So it comes to no surprise that OpenOffice.org on Apple’s OS X is seen as deficient, because it lacks full integration into the User experience. The current version requires the X windowing system to be installed. This poses a double whammy for users, because
- It is an extra installation step, that might not so experienced users from using it
- It does conform to the X Window user interface created for Unix systems, with significant differences to the way other programs work on OS X
There is a porting project underway which has been run solely by volunteers so far. Sun now committed two full time developers to support these efforts. Unfortunately this is only one of two projects that work towards the same goal. The second project being NeoOffice, which tries to achieve the Aqua user interface through using Java. I wished that those two projects could pool their resources and expertise in order to achieve this very desirable goal faster.
