History of NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org: NeoOffice/C

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Introduction History of OpenOffice.org and OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X Neolithic Office (NeoOffice® and NeoOffice®/C) Neolithic Office for Java™ (NeoOffice®/J and NeoOffice®) Timeline and Additional Resources

This overview and history consists of several pages. Click on the links in the box to the right to move to the previous or next section.

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.)