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.
Thanks for the link love. As you’ll see, though, I’m kinda hesitant to call it a “review” series since the software’s in such a dang early stage.
Since you help out on OOo, be sure to keep me honest, too!
Very cool; can’t wait.
I think it’s a good thing to have all of the tools wrapped in a single application; however, that doesn’t mean you can’t provide entry points in other ways. I remember that several releases of Netscape (and perhaps SeaMonkey, though not on the Mac) had icons in the program folder to go straight to various tools (browser, e-mail, composer) rather than loading the program with the default starting tool. These “shortcuts” launch the same application, but they send some other message (via flags?) to trigger a different load than the default.