OpenOffice.org, the coalition developing and maintaining the free, open-source OpenOffice office suite, released on June 5 a first alpha of a Mac OS X-native version of the OpenOffice productivity suite.
Although the project has an existing version for Mac OS X, it requires installation of the Unix-based X11 system (also known as X Window System).
The new version will feature word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, illustration, database and mathematics equation editing applications. While existing versions include those applications too, the new version will feature native-looking Mac OS X interface elements. That said, the current version has made only early progress and still presents a mix of interface looks.
The OpenOffice.org organization also warns that what theyve just published is still an early developer version.
The top known issues include: a lack of printing; broken PDF exporting; copy and paste problems; crashing of the suite when you quit from it; and lack of multiple monitor support.
In fact, the download page features the following words in bold, red letters: “WARNING: THIS SOFTWARE MAY CRASH AND MAY DESTROY YOUR DATA DO NOT USE THIS SOFTWARE FOR REAL WORK IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT.”
The source code of the OpenOffice project includes elements of the StarOffice suite developed by Sun Microsystems. In return, the StarOffice suite, from Version 6.0 onward, has used OpenOffice source code, APIs and other elements.
According to information on the OpenOffice.org Web site, Sun is called “the primary contributor” of code to the OpenOffice project.
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