Posted on Friday 2 December 2005 - Popularity: unranked
Patrick Luby is the person behind NeoOffice/J, a Java based OpenOffice port for OS X, a fully-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing programs). He’s mainly talking about the current status of the project and their relation with the OpenOffice team:
TM: Right now, NeoOffice/J on Mac is an amazing achievement, but its interface is still not quite there yet. For example the widgets and the file dialog box are still non-native. Do you think OS X users will eventually have, thanks to your efforts, a version of OpenOffice that uses Apple’s widgets? And… well, I have to ask you this: when do you think it will happen?
PL: Now that a stable release of Neo/J is out, implementing Aqua widgets and dialogs is getting much closer. We need to upgrade to Java 1.4 first since Apple will not support Java 1.3.1 on the new Intel machines. However, after we move to Java 1.4, our goal is to add native Aqua widgets and dialogs.
TM: What’s your relationship with the OpenOffice developers like? Are you on good terms? Did your project take a while to gain acceptance?
PL: I think that we have a good relationship. I am regularly talking with OOo staff at Sun and Collab.net. While I have heard rumors that Neo/J is separate from OOo due to some conflict, this is far from the truth. The primary reason that Neo/J is separate is that it benefits both OOo and us. Since we are always several months behind OOo’s official releases, doing our development outside of the OOo development process allows us to make changes without breaking the officially supported OOo platforms. Then, once our changes are stable, we donate back any changes that are common to the X11 version of OpenOffice.org.
