

In the summer of 2005, Éric Bachard took over leadership of the port and announced the team's intention to switch development effort away from the X11 version. Later (during the late 1.0.x and 1.1.x cycles) it proved simpler to keep the X11 version running while more invasive development needed to support an Aqua version was done outside the structure (with which the original Mac OS X porting community had had some unpleasant experiences), in what became NeoOffice/C.ĭuring the 2.0 cycle (2004-2005), the Mac X11 team was strengthened by new volunteers and contributors such as Eric Hoch, Éric Bachard, Florian Heckl, Nakata Maho, Pavel Janík, and others. This was also due in part to the success in getting X11 working while the Quartz version would still not build. Start was also updated for each release of prior to 2.0 and to support new X11 options in later versions of Apple's X11.ĭevelopment Challenges for on Mac OS X and the Road to Aquaīecause of the chaotic, constantly-changing nature of the code, limited support from the larger OOo community, the limited number of developers capable of working equally as well in the UNIX/X11 and Mac/Cocoa/Aqua worlds, and limited resources, the Mac porting team had focused on releasing X11-based Mac versions of stable major releases. Start also provided integration of OOo under X11 with the Mac OS X Finder, allowing OOo documents to have Finder icons, supporting drag-and-drop and double-click opening of documents, and providing a drag-and-drop method of converting and installing Macintosh fonts for use with OOo. The application reduced complex UNIX/terminal commands for launching OOo to a true double-click. In addition to tireless QA work on 's Mac OS X bugs, the late Terry Teague wrote the Start application, which was included with the official Mac OS X releases of up until 2.0. For the 1.1.x cycle, a few additional developers have released localized, Mac OS X 10.3.x-only or 10.4.x-only versions for their linguistic communities. Peterlin, and Dan Williams) have spent several hundred hours just to get to build and be relatively stable on Mac OS X with X11.
OPEN OFFICE MAC OS X PPC SOFTWARE
While these versions of OOo are native Mac OS X applications in the sense they are PowerPC code and do not require a software emulator (such as VirtualPC, used on the Mac for running Windows applications designed for Intel processors), their appearance reflects the suite’s UNIX roots, running under X11, a common windowing system on UNIX platforms (Aqua would be a rough Mac OS X equivalent).įor each release prior to 2.0, some combination of four primary developers (Kevin B.
OPEN OFFICE MAC OS X PPC FREE
Since 2000, a small number of dedicated, volunteer developers have toiled over the OOo code in their free time, and, aided by a slightly larger group of volunteer testers and forum members providing "user support," produced Mac OS X-native versions (aka /X11) of 1.0.3 and 1.1.2. These engineers also maintain the Windows, Solaris, and Linux versions of and have the resources to keep up with the constant volume of changes they create.īy contrast, the number of developers actively working on all forms of on the Mac is fewer than a half-dozen at any given time. While as an open source project anyone is able to contribute code to, in practice the lion’s share of the development of core office program features is done by an entire "small company" of Sun engineers, the former StarDivision employees, who are paid to work solely on the project for release as Sun’s StarOffice suite. is an extraordinarily large project, consisting of over eight million lines of code. This code included a partial port of StarOffice to Mac OS X, which formed the basis for on the Mac, as well as the two NeoOffice projects. In October 2000, Sun open-sourced the code to the forthcoming version of the suite, StarOffice 6.0, creating (an open-source community and a software application suite). In 1999, Sun Microsystems bought StarDivision, hoping to use StarOffice to compete with Microsoft Office. The software applications we know today as (OOo) and its Mac version Mac OS X (X11), Neolithic Office ( NeoOffice®/C), and Neolithic Office for Java™ ( NeoOffice®) have their roots in StarOffice™, a suite of office applications for Windows and various UNIX platforms created by the German company StarDivision in the late 1980s and 1990s. History of and on Mac OS X General History of

1.3 Development Challenges for on Mac OS X and the Road to Aqua.
