Update on the native Mac Port

Ran in to Éric B, and he politely corrected me on last blog, in which I described the latest Mac port to Aqua as being purely cocoa'd. It's not: just some elements. That said, it is still quite nice and really amazingly fast. Nice work!

Of course, now is the time to make it pure cocoa, so if you want to join.....

Fun at OOoCon with the new Aqua Port

Haven't slept much since I arrived here in Barcelona for OOoCon 2007 and feel I should get biological but I have to write that not only did I do my morning presentation using the new native-Aqua port but also my afternoon one--and had no, none port-related glitches. It worked brilliantly.

Chapeau to Éric Bachard, Philipp Lohmann, and everyone else who has worked furiously and tirelessly to make the native port possible these last few months (!). I, along with the rest of the millions of Mac users thank you--but I am ahead of myself: the port is still Alpha.

I'm downloading now the very latest one that Éric posted to his ftp site and I believe it's purely Cocoa, not Carbon, plus it fixes lots of issues.

Again, this is a native port: no X11, just the very fast OOo application running natively on Mac OS X Aqua.

The IBM Agreement

The IBM agreement announced today represents a milestone in OpenOffice.org's trajectory. It's not just that IBM is implicitly confirming OpenOffice.org's mission--others have done that, not least of which we can number Redflag--but that it is also throwing its weight behind OpenOffice.org's ODF implementation, as well as furthering it with its accessibility technology.

That last element is particularly relevant for governments, which righty insist on technology all can use, not just a segment of the population. Governments previously chary of committing to the ODF and OpenOffice.org because they were either unsure of accessibility support or unsure of the project's future and nature, may think twice now, assured that the technology will be there--only better and more flexible than the proprietary alternative.

Built by thousands of contributors working from every region of the globe and backed by some of the world's most powerful and visionary IT companies, OpenOffice.org is hardly any longer a thing of wonder, an alternative suite whose main virtue was that it could do for free what others did for a fee. Rather, it can rightly claim to be the first choice and also the right choice.

Oh, memory

Michael Meeks' blog today, 10 Sept. was pointed out to me by more than one person earlier today. Meeks is a reliable blogger and his entries are useful for keeping up with OOo development. Today, his blog focused on the IBM agreement but took a nice swipe at me. And what he wrote surprised me.

"Louis Suarez Potts famously re-assured IBM (Don) in Koper that no-one in the community thinks not-releasing your OO.o code-changes is anti-social (or words to that effect). As a person who had spent some time hammering Don on this topic the night before, I was appalled."

"Famously"? Wow. No, I do not recall saying what Meeks attributes to me at all. And second, as I pointed out to Meeks, not only do I recall that evening session quite clearly (I had put the session together and moderated it), I actually have a public and published record of saying exactly the opposite: that I and the community wanted then and even before that night two years ago for IBM to contribute its work to the project. That community is quite pleased with today's announcement, as am I. It culminates several years' of waiting and proves very clearly the merits of the project both Meeks and I work on. Expect now a brilliant and I am sure interesting future.

Interesting new extension--Teacher's Pet

Teacher's Pet is a menu pulldown that can be added to OpenOffice.org as an extension. Still in Beta, the menu features many clever and useful scripts as commands that will surely help teachers, students (of all levels) and writers. As far as I know, it's available only in English now.

Download it and see how it works with your OpenOffice.org. The URL: www.teachers-pet.org.