|
|
NeoOffice/C
From NeoWiki
The information provided on this page remains available only for historical purposes.
Note: Until late 2004 NeoOffice/C was named simply "NeoOffice" (without the "/C"). This caused confusion, so in December 2004, the classic Cocoa/CoreGraphics version of NeoOffice was renamed to NeoOffice/C.
NeoOffice/C was a prototyping project—not intended for day-to-day use—used to explore methods and problems that may be encountered when porting OpenOffice.org to run natively on Mac OS X.
NeoOffice/C was in development for quite a while (see old screenshots here and here) when it became apparent the approach it was using was slow and impractical.
Basically, using Cocoa with OpenOffice.org would be a herculean effort, and not just a simple port job. The Cocoa worldview (idea of how an application should be designed, operate, and be coded) and that of OpenOffice.org are in stark contrast, and melding the two—or converting one to the other—proved unstable and unsustainable. One could not simply make a 'wrapper' around OpenOffice.org, but instead very large amounts of code (OpenOffice.org is 8 million lines of code) would have to be re-written, with lots of ugly hacks along the way. (For more detail, see posts of NeoOffice.org founder Ed Peterlin aka in this thread and this thread on trinity.)
Thus, a second approach to achieving native Mac OS X look-and-feel was tried using Mac OS X's Java implementation instead of Cocoa to display Aqua. The result was NeoOffice/J (beginning with version 1.2, known simply as NeoOffice), which has supplanted NeoOffice/C as the actively developed Mac OS X project.
