Shaun McDonald's Blog

The UK (Westminster) Government has given a response to the petition on a petition calling on the UK Government to use the OpenDocument format for the storage of documents.
Read the UK Government’s response to the OpenDocument Petition

It seems that they are making no firm commitment to use the OpenDocument format, though are continually reviewing the format to store documents in, and converting them accordingly. They welcome the newer open standards, as it makes it easier to convert from one format to another.

The first in depth review of OpenOffice.org Aqua that I have come across is by Greg Kefalas. This is a four part series starting today, so more information in the coming days. I’ll add links to the other parts of the review as they become available.

Part one
Part two
Part three Many of the problems mentioned are already fixed, or will be fixed for the next developer preview. Also the new chart, which is coming in OpenOffice.org 2.3 will be there too.
Part four Some of the issues raised have already been fixed and will be in the next developer snapshot. Having separate application for Writer, Calc, Impress etc. takes a lot of work to redesign the way ooo works otherwise it would have been implemented by now. The first steps in the project is to simply use native controls and get the most important features of Mac OS X implemented. We will then make a stable release. Thereafter we will look into other things like Applescript and re-organising the menus of OpenOffice.org into palettes. However if someone with a special passion for implementing Applescript support into applications comes along today and that’s all they want to do, we won’t stop them, if they are following our coding guidelines.