The first NeoOffice build tested (with screenshots). UPDATED!

UPDATE: Dan Williams one of the authors of the NeoOffice project answered to my article and told me that a newer version of NeoOffice called Flaming Yeti has been made available. Actually it was already available but the server that hosted the file had a really low bandwidth. I'm already downlaoding that build which is even more promising: print support, drawing fixes, some CoreGraphics support, Mac OS menus, fixes on threading. If you want to know whatit looks like before downloading it, take a look on those screenshots they posted on their website.

Remember some weeks ago, OpenOffice.org team was announcing a new project called NeoOffice. Its aim was to bring a new version of OpenOffice that uses the Aqua interface instead of the XFree one and that doesn't require XDarwin to run. Recently, NeoOffice.org released the first experimental build of NeoOffice.

I could download that prototype build of NeoOffice and launch it on my PowerMac and I even took some interesting screenshots that will give you an idea of what OpenOffice will probably look like in some months.

The first thing I noticed is that the whole application is just one file so the installation of NeoOffice couldn't be made easier, just uncompress the gzip file, mount the disk image and drag the NeoOffice icon in your applications folder. It took quite a while to launch (let's say, 10 times it takes MS Office to launch). Though the long launch time is understandable, as this is only version "0.0", as the new splash screen informs us on startup.

Once launched, I noticed that all the blue windows title-bars have disappeared and were replaced by the cool Aqua interface. Buttons and select menus also use Aqua interface and I can say it overall looks really prettier even if it isn't perfect yet. Actually the major differences between OpenOffice and NeoOffice are the Aqua look and the fact that XDarwin is not longer required to run it (which is really cool!).

The application's menu bars are still inside the main window and some floating tool palettes still use the classic X-Window look, but that's not very shocking. More generally, it seems that NeoOffice doesn't make calls in order to any Cocoa or Carbon routines to display Aqua dialog boxes and the developers might not have planned to do that for NeoOffice.

In terms of stability it's quite better than what says the README file (it says that it will crash after 5 minutes). Though I didn't test it for more than one hour, No crashes or hang-ups occured during testing. There are many known bugs like: crash on saving or when quitting from the in-window menu. I also noticed that there are some display bugs when typing text.

Another difference that I haven't mentioned is that NeoOffice is faster than OpenOffice, it's probably that XDarwin isn't used any longer. Well, it's still far too slow when compared to MS Office which I find slow too!

This early prototype build of NeoOffice is a quite promising although it doesn't seem to use real Cocoa or Carbon GUI calls for system dialog boxes and may never do. The README file included on the image disk states at the end: "NeoOffice is not a supported distribution, and no further engineering work is planned for it. It is simply a starting point for the technical discussions and planning for the final technical strategy of accomplishing Aquafication of OpenOffice.org in a more programmer-friendly and stable manner.". So don't expect any final NeoOffice to release. The project that will go final is OpenOffice.

As for the features, I didn't notice any new ones and I don't think adding features was the aim of this build. A feature that would make OpenOffice even more useful than MS Office is definitely Unicode support. MS applications lack this feature so many languages like Hebrew or Greek aren't supported by Microsoft on the Mac. For example, today it's impossible to accurately write or read some text Greek text on Microsoft Word. Greeks simply have to use PCs. I guess this feature is not yet a priority for the OpenOffice development team so I hope it's a priority for Microsoft's developers for the next release of MS Office.

This prototype build based on QuickDraw instead of XFree window engine shows that there is a lot of work at the moment for the port of OpenOffice to Mac OS X. NeoOffice.org proved with this experimental build that an Aqua version of OpenOffice was feasible. The OpenOffice.org team is already working on CoreGrpahics implementation and also other features like print support. If some of you have some skills on Cocoa/Carbon and Unix development, I'd invite you to download the source code from their site then mail them and offer them help for this project. The Macintosh platform really needs an alternative to MS Office to be independent from Microsoft and OpenOffice is probably the most promising one.

Further details about the development of OpenOffice from the project's team members are welcome here.