NeoOffice

From NeoWiki

The goal of NeoOffice is to provide a stable, free Mac OS X office suite based on the international OpenOffice.org project, with additional Mac features requested by NeoOffice donors.

The OpenOffice.org project is a large open-source effort to create a complete office "suite" including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing software, database, and much more. With OpenOffice.org, users can easily import, edit, and exchange files with users of other office programs, such as Microsoft Office or WordPerfect.

While OpenOffice.org is developed primarily for Windows and Unix systems and has a user-interface geared for those operating systems, NeoOffice has made tremendous breakthroughs in offering the same office features to Macintosh users while making the program look and interact more like a Mac application.

How does it do this? NeoOffice replaces OpenOffice.org code that (formerly) used the X11 windowing system with Cocoa and Java code (leveraging Mac OS X's cool Java integration with Aqua) to provide traditional Macintosh user-interface elements. The result? An office experience that feels more like other Mac applications.

At least that's the goal. At present, NeoOffice has integrated dozens of native Mac features, including many not found in Sun’s version of OpenOffice.org. It's probably localized into your native language, too.

Best of all, NeoOffice is remarkably stable, and its code has been in daily use since 2003. It's actually ready to use right now. Thousands of people and organizations use NeoOffice to do their daily work!

Here's a caveat though—while NeoOffice is quite stable and feature-complete, it has not entirely adopted the Mac look-and-feel. There are still some bits of the old Windows/Unix interface in there. For example, the toolbars and dialogues don't look exactly like those in other Mac applications. Some of the more than 12,000 icons used in the application may look more like Windows icons than Mac ones. Other bits of the interface may look "just a bit off".

So if you think $300+ is a bit much to pay for an office suite, we encourage you to try NeoOffice for free and let us know what you think. There's no catch—like its parent, OpenOffice.org, downloading and using NeoOffice doesn't cost a penny. Copy it as many times as you wish.

All we ask is that you report any bugs you find so they can be fixed. If you are a developer, we'd love to have your code. Or, if you are willing and able to support the development effort via a monetary donation, your contribution will be very much appreciated (and special services are available to NeoOffice donors). You can do so via Paypal at the NeoOffice web site. There are other ways you can contribute to the project, too.

At present, there are very few NeoOffice developers and very limited resources, so every contribution helps.