Shaun McDonald's Blog

There has been some online commentary recently on the likely acceptability of applications on the Mac platform. It basically boils down to: all applications that are successful on the Mac are well designed. They all look and behave the same way. Mac users are very fussy about the way that applications look and run. If they are not happy then they will not use the application, they will find an alternative application.
This basically means that OpenOffice.org for the Mac will have to be different from the main OpenOffice.org in a number of respects. Some of these could be integrated as an option for other platform.
Examples that could be used across all platforms include:

• using palettes instead of dialog boxes for things like the paragraph and character dialogs
• using native colour chooser dialogs
• full document indexing/searching (partly implemented already)
• system address book access
• Mozilla plugin that doesn’t require a full OpenOffice.org installation to work
• quick view (in various incarnations)

Examples of integration specific to the Mac platform (I don’t know if these are available on other platforms):

• iLife integration
• .Mac integration
• Backup integration
• (Leopard only) iChat for collaboration with documents and sharing presentations
• (Leopard only) System-wide ToDo integration

If anyone has any other ideas or comments, please add your comments to this blog post.

Example articles:
Why VRML Failed and What That Means for OpenOffice
All I want for Christmas…