Sun Microsystems has announced that it will be joining OpenOffice.org in porting its office suite to Mac OS X. Open Office currently runs on OS X in and X11 environment. NeoOffice is a fork of that project that provides a Java port for OS X. But it is slooow and Mac users tend to not like Java apps. In contrast, Sun will be helping to create a native Aqua port of Open Office. Good news for ODF on Mac OS X.
Or is it?
There are significant differences in approach to GUI development that make Open Office more at home in Windows or Linux than in OS X. Not to mention that Open Office is huge and crufty. I can’t help but think that the effort would be better placed in an independently developed Mac app that supports the Open Document Format.
Anyway, word-processing is for WIMPs.
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