Next September OpenOffice.org will be releasing its version 3.0 of the software which will finally give native support to OS X without having to install X11 beforehand. In case you Apple guys didn’t realize, you can already do this with a port of OpenOffice called NeoOffice that I have been using for months now.
NeoOffice isn’t affiliated with OpenOffice at all, other then they use a lot of OpenOffice’s source code, NeoOffice has been out of beta for a few months and runs very smoothly.
“The latest version 2.2.1 of NeoOffice includes support for Mac OS X Spellchecker and Address Book, and experimental support for opening Open XML files created by Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007. It was released late last month and is downloadable from neooffice.org.” –ComputerWorld
It is interesting that if you want to have support for opening OpenXML files with OpenOffice.org you will have to wait until version 3.0 of the software next year. That is one of the reasons that I hate using open source software that is backed by a lot of money, Firefox has similar problems, just because it is free and is doing better then a lot of its competitors it doesn’t mean that you should take soooo long to add new features that people need. Firefox crashes all of the time and OpenOffice can’t get the key features in, but I don’t want to go on a rant about open source software because all of you will think I don’t like it, I love open source software, but when you start giving these coders money they quit doing it for the love of it and start doing it for the money (not to say that there is much money in open source software but you get the idea).
I’m excited for OpenOffice.org 3.0 and I really hope that updating the UI is on there to do list because lets be honest, OpenOffice.org is looking a bit stale compared to Microsoft Office (you couldn’t say that just a year or so ago, but now it is easily apparent).
If you want to download the latest build of the aqua version of OpenOffice.org you can do so here.