ANTenna Blog -- Hardware & Software

Mac support has never been a big selling point for OpenOffice.org. Fortunately, this is about to change in a big way.

The OpenOffice.org open-source productivity suitewill run on OS X today, just as it has for years. Unlike most Mac software, however, OOo did not use Aqua, the familiar OS X graphical user interface. Instead, it uses Apple's version of the venerable X Window System, also known as X11 or simply X.

X11 has been around in its current form, or something very similar, since the mid-1980s. It is commonplace on Unix and Unix-like systems; over the years, it has formed the graphical foundation for thousands of applications. Technically, X11 isn't so much a full-fledged graphical user interface as it is a framework upon which developers can build their own GUI-based applications.

Currently, every Mac ships with X11 pre-installed, and the last couple of Mac OS X releases have integrated it pretty tightly with the Mac's Quartz graphics subsystem. Quite a few Mac users take advantage of this to run X11-based applications developed originally for Unix-like operating systems -- including FreeBSD, the open-source OS that was used as the foundation for OS X.

Although the Mac's X11 integration is very good today, applications that rely upon it -- including previous versions of OpenOffice.org -- simply don't have the same polished look and feel as those using the Mac-native Aqua GUI. Like most open-source projects, OpenOffice.org had to decide where to focus its limited software development and testing resources -- and for the past several years, that meant keeping its work on an Aqua-based version of OOo on the back burner.

That will change with OpenOffice.org version 3.0, which is currently in beta testing. The new version features full Aqua support on both the Intel and PowerPC versions of Mac OS X; just as important, it will take full advantage of the accessibility features that are available to Aqua-based Mac applications.

If you want to check out the current OOo beta release for Mac OS X, you can download it here; although it works pretty well at this point, keep in mind that, like most beta releases, this one still has a few bugs lurking under the hood.

OpenOffice.org is aiming for a September launch of OOo version 3.0 on all of its supported platforms, including Mac OS X.