a million monkeys typing

NeoOffice/J 1.1 Finally Released

Posted June 22nd, 2005 at 07:09pm

After five years of development, NeoOffice/J is finally released. From the announcement (found in a NeoWiki cache):

The goal of NeoOffice/J is to provide an entirely free and complete Mac OS X office suite based on the international OpenOffice.org project — only with the look-and-feel you’d expect from any Macintosh application.

The OpenOffice.org project is a large open-source effort to create the ultimate office “suite” including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing software, and much more. With OpenOffice.org, you can easily import, edit, and exchange files with users of other office programs, such as Microsoft Office or WordPerfect.

I’ve been using OpenOffice(.org) for years on Linux and Windows, and have found it to be perfect for my needs — in fact, it’s my preferred office suite. It’s great to finally have a Mac-native version with full support for all the OS X trimmings. Only downside? This is based on the older –but stable– OOo 1.1.4, while OpenOffice.org is nearing its 2.0 release (due this summer). I hear that the NeoOffice/J team has donated code back to the project to enhance the Mac compatibility, so hopefully this is a sign of good things to come. I do have a feeling that the Mac native version will still lag behind the Linux and Windows versions after 2.0 is released, though.

(BTW, don’t let the Java-based interface scare you. After start-up, it runs at a decent clip even on my G3 400MHz Powerbook.)