OpenOffice 3 goes native on the Mac The latest version of OpenOffice - providing you can get at it - supports Macs natively for the first time. Version 3 of the open source office suite, released on Monday, contains a native port for Mac OS X. That means Mac users can run the alternative to Microsoft Office without having to go through the chore of installing …
"For now, going to BitTorrent and waiting until the weekend to download the software, after the rush will surely have passed, seem the most sensible options."
The advantage of bit torrent is that it's faster when more people are downloading, so why wait until after the rush.
I've downloaded and installed a copy of the 'American' version (via one of the mirror servers), and it displays "English (UK)" at the bottom of the text document window. Not really had a chance to play with it yet but on this Intel Mac it's running well.
And it must be "going to BitTorrent OR waiting for the weekend"...John needs to brush up on his Boolean logic :)
@ Samsara and Bad Beaver
It's available on mirror sites but, for some reason, not on the home site.
I got mine here:
http://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/3.0.0rc4/
Just scroll down; you'll find it.
Installs and works like a charm!
@The BigYin
The same site has versions for both Intel and PPC labeled "*_Install_en-GB.dmg", so I'm guessing that you should be good to go.
Strange... I downloaded dev300_m31 just last week, but now the whole m31 directory is gone from the mirrors. Hopefully it will show up in stable soon. It's nice, but still needs the same old tweaks to get decent performance: reduce the number of undo history steps, increase graphics cache, turn off the Java runtime environment.
There is something else about OpenOffice.org 3.0 that I think your readership will find VERY interesting.
OpenOffice.org is the first application that is multi-platform accessible, exposing a rich set of information to assistive technologies on Windows, Solaris, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X (Intel-based Macs only). OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the first version to run natively on Mac OS X that will have the look and feel of an Aqua application while supporting the Mac OS X accessibility APIs, and integrating well with the built-in Macintosh VoiceOver screen reader - offering better accessibility support than many other applications available for Mac OS X.
“Sun and the OpenOffice.org community take accessibility very seriously, whether in schools, in the home, in the workplace or in government institutions. An accessible solution for editing documents, spreadsheets, and creating presentations is of vital importance to the hundreds of millions of people worldwide with disabilities,” said Peter Korn, accessibility architect at Sun Microsystems and co-chair of the OASIS OpenDocument accessibility subcommittee. “We have listened and responded to the community and our engineering efforts are a direct result of the requests we’ve received from the user community and exemplifies the innovation and success of the many open source initiatives at Sun and OpenOffice.org.”
<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/pub/1/b44/b25">Thomas Wlodkowski Director of Accessibility at AOL</a>
"As a blind consumer who uses Mac OS 10 to carry out daily office tasks, I was pleased to see the progress that the OpenOffice.org community has made in addressing compatibility with Apple's VoiceOver screen reader. It is reassuring to know that consumers with disabilities will be able to move between computer platforms and enjoy equivalent access to applications that are critical to basic job performance."
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The download was fine, the software is great. Some good improvements over 2.4. The language is definitely UK English, it spotted the errors with "neighbor" "color" and "Bush is a great President".
All in all, a nice successor in the OpenOffice range.
Mine's the one with the Concise OED in the inside pocket.
Downloaded it yesterday - no problems. Installation was simple and completely uneventful.
Had a problem with a document that the useless Office 2008 Word wouldn't work with (it was a form where a field was locked and Word wouldn't unlock). It worked perfectly with Open Office 3.
This was my first ever experience with OO and I was very impressed. Even the Powerpoint application had no problems with some presentations that Powerpoint 2008 shagged (it "blanked" some slides).
At last there's a real alternative to the bloated, buggy, half-finished and expensive second rate Office 2008 with fugly templates that Microsoft has produced for the Mac.
Well done to all involved with Open Office.
<quote>
American != English.
</quote>
Lets see American spoken by ~2 billion people. English (including Scottish) is spoken by - what - three people? I feel sorry for you that "English" is a dying language..... You should try the language widget on Dashboard. I suspect they have an American to English translation you can use.
That's not bloat. Bloat is about how uselessly BIG it is. How slow it is is because Java is on.
Turn Java off and it's a lot quicker.
PS if OOo didn't have all those features, we;d have 100x as many twunts on here saying "it doesn't do anywhere NEAR what Office does, so it's a useless toy for all you linux zealots!"
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