A Real Open Office for Mac!
Have you been watching the progress of Open Office the past few years? Yea, me too. They have been working on an ever-improving alternative to Microsoft’s dominant solution. While the development has steadily moved forward, those of us in the Mac community have been frustrated with the non-native support. You could run it on OS X, but it required the X11 window environment. While this may not seem like much, it is. It means slow performance at the very least, and excessive use of ram memory.
Things have finally changed in the world of Open Office. The beta of their next release (3.0), has native support for OS X. It does require an Intel-based machine, but other than that, you are good to go.
So how does this new version run? Well, it is still a bit slow. I am not fully surprised, as this is beta. The initial launch takes a little while, and then opening a new text doc takes even longer. This has been an annoyance of mine for a long time with Open Office, and I hope the final version resolves these launch issues.
This new version looks a lot more “normal” in OS X, as it begins to take on a similar look and feel as other native apps. Unfortunately, it is not 100% yet.
After opening a new doc, I find that writing text has a significant delay at first, and then catches up over time. Again, this is something I really hope gets fixed as 3.0 develops. Slow launch times combined with delays in the application itself are a quick way to lose popularity.
In spite of the obvious performance hurdles, the big step forward into being a native application is very promising. I hope it is a really positive sign of things to come.
For the geeks wondering, the machine I am using right now is a Macbook (white), 2.0 Ghz Core2Duo, 2GB of memory.
Give Open Office a try, and let me know what you think.
