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Magnus · 22nd March 2008, 08:04

There is a new OpenOffice.org being developed, version 3 I believe, and it's going to be be fully a true Mac application. Previous versions you had to run in X Windows so it didn't look and work like Mac applications should which made it a bit less user friendly than it should be for most users to really like it. Now that's changing, which is great news. It's good to have options and with the new version OpenOffice.org becomes a real contender in the market for office suites on Mac, just as it has been on Windows for man years.

NeoOffice is still around but once this OpenOffice.org version is out it's hard to see what NeoOffice has to offer anymore that's better. I've used NeoOffice from time to time and it's not bad, but I've always found it kind of sluggish. If I understand it right it uses Java to run the Mac OS X interface as a frontend to the OpenOffice.org application, so it's not really native Mac OS X, which the new OpenOffice.org is. But perhaps the NeoOffice guys have something up their sleeve.

You can download and try new OpenOffice.org (about 160Mb file). Go here, click on the mirror of your choice, then the Developer folder, then the Dev_300 folder, and click on the Mac version.

This version is a "development snapshot", which is something that comes before beta. So don't expect that you can use this for everyday work, expect bugs and problems. The final version is expected later this year.

22nd March 2008, 08:04	#1 (permalink)
Magnus Administrator Join Date: Apr 2006 Location: Dubai Posts: 8,542	New OpenOffice.org is fully Aqua There is a new OpenOffice.org being developed, version 3 I believe, and it's going to be be fully a true Mac application. Previous versions you had to run in X Windows so it didn't look and work like Mac applications should which made it a bit less user friendly than it should be for most users to really like it. Now that's changing, which is great news. It's good to have options and with the new version OpenOffice.org becomes a real contender in the market for office suites on Mac, just as it has been on Windows for man years. NeoOffice is still around but once this OpenOffice.org version is out it's hard to see what NeoOffice has to offer anymore that's better. I've used NeoOffice from time to time and it's not bad, but I've always found it kind of sluggish. If I understand it right it uses Java to run the Mac OS X interface as a frontend to the OpenOffice.org application, so it's not really native Mac OS X, which the new OpenOffice.org is. But perhaps the NeoOffice guys have something up their sleeve. You can download and try new OpenOffice.org (about 160Mb file). Go here, click on the mirror of your choice, then the Developer folder, then the Dev_300 folder, and click on the Mac version. This version is a "development snapshot", which is something that comes before beta. So don't expect that you can use this for everyday work, expect bugs and problems. The final version is expected later this year.