History of NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org: NeoOffice/C

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Neolithic Office (NeoOffice® and NeoOffice®/C)

In order to prototype methods for adding native Mac features and an Aqua appearance without fighting the constantly-changing OpenOffice.org code, Edward H. Peterlin (lead developer on the Mac port of OpenOffice.org 1.0.3) and Dan Williams (a primary developer of the 1.0.3 port) began the NeoOffice/C project. (Note: In December of 2004, the by-then-dormant original NeoOffice was renamed "NeoOffice/C"—"C" stands for Cocoa—in order to prevent confusion with the actively-developed NeoOffice/J and to allow NeoOffice/J to one day use the NeoOffice moniker. To avoid confusion, it will henceforth be referred to as "NeoOffice/C".) Written originally over a weekend in response to the Sun-Apple-StarOffice vaporware fiasco, the suite's first appearance as “NeoOffice” was as a proof-of-concept application for the O'Reilly Mac OS X Con 2002.

The NeoOffice/C project sought to replace X11 technologies with native Mac APIs and routines like CoreGraphics and ATSUI in order to give OpenOffice.org a Mac “look-and-feel” and make it a well-behaved Mac application. NeoOffice/C was a prototype project aimed at software developers only and was not stable enough for day-to-day use. Its two binary "releases" only ran under Mac OS X 10.2.x ("Jaguar") and then only for a few minutes at a time.

As of late 2004, NeoOffice/C had ceased development, but many of the lessons learned in its early development were being applied to further development of its sister, NeoOffice/J (now known simply as NeoOffice). The work also formed the basis of the Native Widget and Native Menu Frameworks that debuted in OpenOffice.org 1.1; these frameworks are being used to provided operating system-specific menus and buttons by NeoOffice as well as by OpenOffice.org implementations under Linux GUIs such as KDE.

Screenshots from NeoOffice/C

Flaming Yeti build (26-Nov-2002, OpenOffice.org 1.0-based) Built for O'Reilly OSXCON 2002.

Incendiary Goblin build, aka NeoOffice/C 0.0.1 (22-June-2003, OpenOffice.org 1.1-based) Built for Apple's WWDC 2003.

("NeoOffice" is a registered trademark of Planamesa Inc.)