From the mac@porting.openoffice.org mailing list, there seems to have been a bit of confusion with the title "OpenOffice.org for Mac (X11)". It would appear that people are thinking the Mac OS 11 is what the download is for. In fact it just references the fact that the X11 windowing system.
It would appear that this increase in traffic has something to do with there no longer being information on the installation of X11 on the final download page.
Ahead of the OpenOffice.org conference, I have just released the new download pages for OpenOffice.org (X11) on the Mac. They are now much simpler than before. The download is now available at http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/. The old download pages (except the legacy download for 1.1.2) redirect to the new pages.
Part of this is the fact that there is no longer a big long list of mirrors to choose from. This is because I have used the OpenOffice download bouncer for all the downloads in the OpenOffice.org download servers. If anyone else needs to update the pages in the future, you will need to speak to cloph on IRC, who is able to update the bouncer with the new files.
I'd like to thank Fipa for his design, and James McKenzie on the mac@porting.openoffice.org list for his feedback.
There are more updates to come to the OpenOffice Mac Porting site before the end of the month, thereafter updates to the site will slow down.
I'm waiting on fink compiling quanta, which is the editor that Fipa used to create the pages, so hopefully I'll find it easier to keep the site up to date with the new design. I hope that it will be better than the more than a year old Nvu, even if I have to use X11.
The Mac OS X Porting Team have released a roadmap of their development of the Aqua version of OpenOffice.org without the need for X11.
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The new Google Archive Search is a great tool, with even more potential.
The timeline feature is really neat, though could be more customisable. For example being able to show more articles on one page.
Here's and example search for all articles related to Mac OpenOffice in timeline form.
It would appear that many news organisations have picked up on the OpenOffice Aqua news wrongly. OpenOffice are only going to preview the latest Aqua build at the OpenOffice conference and Apple Expo in Paris, next month.
Pages that have picked up on the story and claim that the OpenOffice Mac Porting Team are going to release an Aqua version of OpenOffice next month include:
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20060830085917126
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=15712&Page=1&pagePos=2
http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/31/0111246
Well you never know a miracle may occur and that will happen, though the current estimate is 6-12 months for a final version of OpenOffice in Aqua to be release by the OpenOffice.org Mac Porting Team.
I've been playing around with one of Eric Bachard's recent Intel OpenOffice Aqua builds. Although it crashes a lot, it does work to some degree.
The crash reporter has a crashing bug in it so I had to disable it using the startup switch -norestore.
Eric had said to me not to run the registration wizard by using the startup switch -nofirststartwizard. However, it worked every time for me, apart from being slow.
There are also two environment variables that need to be set to be able to use the native menus or widgets. These are:export AQUA_NATIVE_CONTROLS=TRUEexport AQUA_NATIVE_MENUS=TRUE
It won't be until early 2007 that we there will be an alpha build available of OpenOffice running on the Mac without X11. Until then, you have OpenOffice running within X11. It is available to download from http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ooo-osx_downloads.html.
Please look at slides 11 - 13, as these contain all the changes.
Primarily, I have added what I think should be in the user and developer sections of the mac porting web site.
http://smsm1.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ooo/MacPortingWebSite.pdf
http://smsm1.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ooo/MacPortingWebSite.odp
To see the current draft please look at http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/testing/index.html
It would appear from the Google Labs that Google SMS (UK) has graduated from the labs. It used to work. But doesn't any more!
All you get now is a message which says
"Google SMS is currently not available in the UK. The service is still in beta, and we're working hard to make it better.
For more information about our mobile services, please see mobile.google.co.uk."
Then you get redirected to the Google Mobile page. Google mobile is not as good, for many things.
It would appear that Dell is getting a lot of publicity about the 4 million laptop batteries that are being recalled.
OK I'm not going to say that Apple is perfect, though it would appear that it took Dell quite some time to acknowledge the issue. Well over a year!
I couldn't believe it that simply pressing the command key on moving a file to another drive will move it rather than delete it.
