Shaun McDonald's Blog

In the process of putting the log files of the Mac OS X porting meeting logs up on to the OpenOffice.org Wiki, I have been having a few problems. This has primarily been due to the location of new lines.

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…

I recently installed Inkscape. This was interesting for me because Inkscape is similar to OpenOffice.org on the Mac. It too needs X11 to run and has a special launcher to help integrate the program with the OS.

They have the easy installation similar to what will be introduced in the next release of OpenOffice.org.

What is more interesting is that on first start they have a message “Font caches may need to be updated”. This allow the user torun a program called fc-cache.

I don’t know if this could be of any use in OpenOffice.org. As OpenOffice.org on the Mac has done various things to allow the support of fonts installed for Mac OS X applications to be used in OpenOffice.org too.

Something that was even more interesting for me was the application that produced the Mac OS X integration. It seemed that they didn’t use a simple Applescript droplet. Instead they seem to have used an Applescript studio or XCode application and used Interface Builder to produce the application. One advantage is that way you don’t need to have a menu called “edit” with a menu item in it called “edit script”. This has confused a number of OpenOffice.org users before.

The easy to use and free for personal use backup program called iBackup now has a plugin, written by me, to allow the easy backup of your OpenOffice.org 2 preferences. I have also included the preferences for the upcoming native version of OpenOffice.org. They are in a separate location compared to the preferences for the X11 to prevent the Aqua development versions of OpenOffice.org corrupting your X11 OpenOffice.org preferences.

Just found the Dash Blog dashboard widget. Might make me blog a bit more.

It seems as though Nvu have been busy. They seem to be nearing a 1.0 release.

Nvu is an open-source project, built on Mozilla.

There is a minor update to the Mail plugin so it should prevent the problem with hotmail requiring verification now.

I have just come accross this remote for Mac OS X, very useful, though the mouse movement is very poor.

I’ve managed to install Subversion. Not yet managed to get it fully up and running yet though, as I can’t find the libraries for Apache 2.

I have just found this fantasic peice of software.

You can use it as a simple graphic calulator, it’s the first I have seen for Mac OS X.