the open source was mentioned in the context of safari. (of which the openness.. where can you get the code?)
what does open office have to do with it? go to <a href="http://www.openoffice.org"; target="_blank">www.openoffice.org</a> and get it. it runs ok in os x. no compiling. woh.
<strong>What the original poster is getting at is a closed cocoa front-end to an open "OpenOffice" core
much like Safari and it's open "WebCore" HTML rendering engine
So the guts of the office killer will be open, but the interface will be proprietary cocoa..
is this actually feasible? i have no idea...[ 01-09-2003: Message edited by: Paul ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
This is exactly what I'm getting at.
OfficeKiller X will be to OpenOffice what Safari is to Konqueror.
And yes, it's absolutely feasible. There was even an utterly shit alpha build of exactly this on the web for a while until the porting team disappeared ...
And yes, it's absolutely feasible. There was even an utterly shit alpha build of exactly this on the web for a while until the porting team disappeared ...
</strong>
<hr></blockquote>
As a programmer and big open source booster I'm doubtful of the feasibility of this.
If Apple can pull this off, both technically and in uptake and acceptance, then my respect for them will multiply. At the moment however, Apple needs to play to its strengths and use 'wait and see' tactics on this one.
If the OO/OASIS xml formats get adopted by the EU members' governments for document exchange/archiving then all bets are off.
---
Also the 'utterly shit alpha' you refer to wasn't a cocoa wrapper, it was custom X11 widgets tweaked to look a bit like Aqua.
It was similar to the OroborusX window manager (or Mozilla's classic gui or Chimera's form widgets) in that it had minor successes with the look but failed miserably with the feel.
Cocoa wrapping would involve an order of magnitude greater amount of work.
It can be done. Much more difficult but it can be done. In the same way that MacGIMP was being cocoafied ... in the same way that Konqueror had the guts ripped out and a whole new app / GUI built around it.
[quote]Originally posted by stupider...likeafox:
<strong>
As a programmer and big open source booster I'm doubtful of the feasibility of this.
If Apple can pull this off, both technically and in uptake and acceptance, then my respect for them will multiply. At the moment however, Apple needs to play to its strengths and use 'wait and see' tactics on this one.
If the OO/OASIS xml formats get adopted by the EU members' governments for document exchange/archiving then all bets are off.
---
Also the 'utterly shit alpha' you refer to wasn't a cocoa wrapper, it was custom X11 widgets tweaked to look a bit like Aqua.
It was similar to the OroborusX window manager (or Mozilla's classic gui or Chimera's form widgets) in that it had minor successes with the look but failed miserably with the feel.
Cocoa wrapping would involve an order of magnitude greater amount of work.</strong><hr></blockquote>
<strong>It can be done. Much more difficult but it can be done. In the same way that MacGIMP was being cocoafied ... in the same way that Konqueror had the guts ripped out and a whole new app / GUI built around it.
Apple just had to stub out a few dependencies and wrap it with Objective-C to make it work.
Similarly, although there has been a lot of talk I'm unaware of any strong effort to port the gimp as it is too interwingled with X11 code. The fabled revision 2 of the gimp was supposed to modularize everything so that a Cocoa (or Win32) port would be easy, but I've not heard anything about that for over a year either.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but I wouldn't underestimate the difficulty of doing it, in fact I would say that you could easily argue that the effort to port it or to start from scratch would be in the same ballpark.
I had high hopes for open office after Apple's X11 came out. Downloaded it, tried it, it wouldn't work. Blah. Then I tried Abiword to see if it at least had some aqua-fication. But no. Still god-awfully ugly. WTF is up with that weird angle on the mouse pointer? And printing is arcane. I couldn't figure it out (I'm sure I could have, but didn't want to go to the trouble). Still much work to be done.
I just realized that you might be referring to the recent film-gimp announcement.
If you are then they are in the process of making the gtk 1.2 gui toolkit native. This is less impressive than it sounds and has been totally gazumped (as far as I can tell) by the release of an official X11 client by Apple.
Before Apple announced Safari, everyone (including me!) was expecting them to use Mozilla. They picked out a lean, dark horse rendering engine and used that. Mozilla is just too bloated, among other things, and Apple is obviously keen on accomplishing as much as possible in as little time as possible, so they're looking for light, agile and well-written codebases.
Now, everyone expects them to use OpenOffice. OpenOffice is bloated, and since it encompasses everything from formatting engines to a UI, they'd have to do spend a lot of time getting up to speed on the codebase, then a lot more time ripping out and refactoring and rewriting it, and building a new UI on top of it (which might lead to more reworking underneath).
An office "app" — suite would be more appropriate — is big enough that Apple could produce their own by corraling a number of OS solutions together with some Cocoa code. In fact, this already describes OS X to a T.
But don't look for the big, obvious OS codebase. Look for something lean and mean like KHTML is. That's the kind of open source that Apple really loves.
I hope you guys did take the time to look at the Mac OS X porting page. Find the timeline. They are supposed to have alpha quality Quartz done. The report on one of the pages says that the Quartz builds but there's no GUI. Basically, the back-end is pretty good, now they need a front.
Something like summer 2004 they're supposed to release the final version of Aqua OpenOffice.org. I say MWNY(B) time by the looks of the timeline. But it will of course be too late to be of much significance.
This topic is of much interest to me and I have searched high and low through SourceForge and Freshmeat for some kind of office. I have found nothing significant. There's Siag which is crap, then KOffice, which is the only viable competitor to OpenOffice. And I've found little or no components or libraries relating to any office type app.
And where did Keynote come from? I'm sure that Apple has known that someday they will have to do their own thing to stay alive. With Safari, they are legally allowed to use code from Mozilla. There is probably a core for every office app along with libraries gradually maturing somewhere on Apple campus. Keynote was probably finally putting a professional interface and price tag on it. With that $100 dollars from every person who bought it, they're putting money into making it better and completing the office puzzle.
Comments
what does open office have to do with it? go to <a href="http://www.openoffice.org"; target="_blank">www.openoffice.org</a> and get it. it runs ok in os x. no compiling. woh.
[ 01-09-2003: Message edited by: Mulattabianca ]</p>
Anyone care to translate?
[quote]Open Source
We Think Its Great!<hr></blockquote>
and I think what the original poster is getting at is a closed cocoa front-end to an open "OpenOffice" core
much like Safari and it's open "WebCore" HTML rendering engine
So the guts of the office killer will be open, but the interface will be proprietary cocoa..
is this actually feasible? i have no idea...
Edit: only one typo!! DVORAK is getting better and better!!!
[ 01-09-2003: Message edited by: Paul ]</p>
<a href="http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/"; target="_blank">http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/</a>;
+
<a href="http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ooo-osx_downloads.html"; target="_blank">http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ooo-osx_downloads.html</a>;
( <a href="http://whiteboard.openoffice.org/screenshots/mac_shots.html"; target="_blank">http://whiteboard.openoffice.org/screenshots/mac_shots.html</a>; )
does the apple version of X11 mean that OpenOffice will be aquafied?
How hard is it for the casual user (me) who knows NOTHING about linux and very very little about UNIX to install these beasts?
the next 6 months are going to be interesting...
will MWNY hold a demo of OpenOffice during the keynote??
<strong>What the original poster is getting at is a closed cocoa front-end to an open "OpenOffice" core
much like Safari and it's open "WebCore" HTML rendering engine
So the guts of the office killer will be open, but the interface will be proprietary cocoa..
is this actually feasible? i have no idea...[ 01-09-2003: Message edited by: Paul ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
This is exactly what I'm getting at.
OfficeKiller X will be to OpenOffice what Safari is to Konqueror.
And yes, it's absolutely feasible. There was even an utterly shit alpha build of exactly this on the web for a while until the porting team disappeared ...
<strong>
does the apple version of X11 mean that OpenOffice will be aquafied?</strong><hr></blockquote>
No.
<strong>
And yes, it's absolutely feasible. There was even an utterly shit alpha build of exactly this on the web for a while until the porting team disappeared ...
</strong>
<hr></blockquote>
As a programmer and big open source booster I'm doubtful of the feasibility of this.
If Apple can pull this off, both technically and in uptake and acceptance, then my respect for them will multiply. At the moment however, Apple needs to play to its strengths and use 'wait and see' tactics on this one.
If the OO/OASIS xml formats get adopted by the EU members' governments for document exchange/archiving then all bets are off.
---
Also the 'utterly shit alpha' you refer to wasn't a cocoa wrapper, it was custom X11 widgets tweaked to look a bit like Aqua.
It was similar to the OroborusX window manager (or Mozilla's classic gui or Chimera's form widgets) in that it had minor successes with the look but failed miserably with the feel.
Cocoa wrapping would involve an order of magnitude greater amount of work.
[quote]Originally posted by stupider...likeafox:
<strong>
As a programmer and big open source booster I'm doubtful of the feasibility of this.
If Apple can pull this off, both technically and in uptake and acceptance, then my respect for them will multiply. At the moment however, Apple needs to play to its strengths and use 'wait and see' tactics on this one.
If the OO/OASIS xml formats get adopted by the EU members' governments for document exchange/archiving then all bets are off.
---
Also the 'utterly shit alpha' you refer to wasn't a cocoa wrapper, it was custom X11 widgets tweaked to look a bit like Aqua.
It was similar to the OroborusX window manager (or Mozilla's classic gui or Chimera's form widgets) in that it had minor successes with the look but failed miserably with the feel.
Cocoa wrapping would involve an order of magnitude greater amount of work.</strong><hr></blockquote>
<strong>It can be done. Much more difficult but it can be done. In the same way that MacGIMP was being cocoafied ... in the same way that Konqueror had the guts ripped out and a whole new app / GUI built around it.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
But Konqueror didn't have it's guts ripped out, khtml was always a seperate library. If you look at <a href="http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/kdeqt/kde3arch/khtml/"; target="_blank">http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/kdeqt/kde3arch/khtml/</a>; you can see a 'browser' written in 20 lines of code in the same way that you can write a Cocoa text editor with 20 lines.
Apple just had to stub out a few dependencies and wrap it with Objective-C to make it work.
Similarly, although there has been a lot of talk I'm unaware of any strong effort to port the gimp as it is too interwingled with X11 code. The fabled revision 2 of the gimp was supposed to modularize everything so that a Cocoa (or Win32) port would be easy, but I've not heard anything about that for over a year either.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but I wouldn't underestimate the difficulty of doing it, in fact I would say that you could easily argue that the effort to port it or to start from scratch would be in the same ballpark.
If you are then they are in the process of making the gtk 1.2 gui toolkit native. This is less impressive than it sounds and has been totally gazumped (as far as I can tell) by the release of an official X11 client by Apple.
Check out their progress:
<a href="http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net/screen/gtktestthing.html"; target="_blank">http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net/screen/gtktestthing.html</a>;
Originally posted by Paul
any news on this?
On what?
Steve was referring to Safari and KHTML. What else?
If you *really* want to read further into it, just think aout how Mac OS X's own core is built on open source software.
oops.. nevermind
Now, everyone expects them to use OpenOffice. OpenOffice is bloated, and since it encompasses everything from formatting engines to a UI, they'd have to do spend a lot of time getting up to speed on the codebase, then a lot more time ripping out and refactoring and rewriting it, and building a new UI on top of it (which might lead to more reworking underneath).
An office "app" — suite would be more appropriate — is big enough that Apple could produce their own by corraling a number of OS solutions together with some Cocoa code. In fact, this already describes OS X to a T.
But don't look for the big, obvious OS codebase. Look for something lean and mean like KHTML is. That's the kind of open source that Apple really loves.
Something like summer 2004 they're supposed to release the final version of Aqua OpenOffice.org. I say MWNY(B) time by the looks of the timeline. But it will of course be too late to be of much significance.
This topic is of much interest to me and I have searched high and low through SourceForge and Freshmeat for some kind of office. I have found nothing significant. There's Siag which is crap, then KOffice, which is the only viable competitor to OpenOffice. And I've found little or no components or libraries relating to any office type app.
And where did Keynote come from? I'm sure that Apple has known that someday they will have to do their own thing to stay alive. With Safari, they are legally allowed to use code from Mozilla. There is probably a core for every office app along with libraries gradually maturing somewhere on Apple campus. Keynote was probably finally putting a professional interface and price tag on it. With that $100 dollars from every person who bought it, they're putting money into making it better and completing the office puzzle.