OpenOffice Aqua released for Mac OSX Tiger
The OpenOffice team has finally released a version of the OpenOffice suite for Mac OSX Tiger (version 10.4.x) that doesn’t require the X11 environment to be installed in order to use it. This is an alpha release and it has a number of limitations which detract from it being, well, useful.
Among the chief limitations is, it can not yet print documents. So, doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of an office suite? I sure think it does. Strike one.
Copy and paste does not fully work, primarily between applications. I couldn’t even begin to live with that. Strike two.
It doesn’t fully support exporting documents as PDF files, since I hate PDF files any way, this really wouldn’t bother me but I know plenty of people who love them. Ball one.
The last thing that really gets me is that quitting OpenOffice causes it to crash. Strike three, you’re outta there!
Honestly, it would have been better if they had just maybe announced that they were working on a port instead of releasing a half baked package that barely works. Yes, it’s an alpha, I can excuse the crashing, the inability of it to export documents as PDF and even the copy and paste but I cannot forgive the lack of printing support.
Go ahead, create a document but you won’t be able to print it. That’s just silly and defeats the purpose.
OpenOffice is available for Macs running both PowerPC and Intel processors but there is aleady a "port" of OpenOffice that supports all its features, it’s called NeoOffice which works fully and is not limited in any way. The OpenOffice team shouldn’t have bothered.
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June 8th, 2007
This article makes me angry, from the misleading headline, to the sheer negativity of an amazing project, and the authors complete lack of understanding of what a first Alpha build is for.
NeoOffice has filled this gap for ages, but has a reputation for being a bit slow and memory hungry. A hopefully better and integrated release, when it is complete, will mean all platforms at the same time get the latest version of this high quality software.
Roll on OpenOffice Aqua!
October 2nd, 2007
I just came across this article, courtesy of google, and quite agree with Mark B. Nuff said!