A New Old Tool for Mac User’s
As I’ve been working at my new job for Sun Microsystems for about 7 months now, I’m starting to put some standards in place for our group. One thing my manager and I wanted to do was use Sun tools for standard documentation. I use a Mac as do many thousands of Sun employees. I also create Information Architecture documents. The standard thought might be Visio, of course. That then implies Virtual PC which is sooooooo slow. I could also use OmniGraffle, but it’s only good on a Mac.
I’ve been having this tools discussion with many of my colleagues lately, (local and virtual). Well the a really good (and might I add free) solution was right under my nose.
It’s called NeoOffice. It is an incarnation of something called OpenOffice which Sun contributes to the creation of as they are very good community and open source supporters and contributors. I started using OpenOffice, but it requires x11 and it’s slow. I found NeoOffice about 4 months into my employment and was thrilled, but didn’t think it would make sense as a tool. I found out I was wrong.
So it’s free, it’s compatible with Microsoft Office and it’s for Macs. It can also do html pretty well, so you might be able to ditch your Dreamweaver too. !
Go get it: http://www.neooffice.org/
3 Comments
Have you found neoOffice considerably better for OSX? I, too, have been disapointed with OpenOffice on OSX, and, it appears the OSX native port is on permanent hold until they can get more developers volunteering for it (or is neoOffice now the official OSX project?). I will definitely try NeoOffice!
Oh…and thanks, Sun.
Yes, NeoOffice is much better. OpenOffice is very top heavy and tends to crash fairly frequently in my experience. NeoOffice is much more nimble. For IA work, it’s not nearly as advanced as a Visio product, but it’s much more portable for multiple contributors.
I’ve been quite impressed with the feel of NeoOffice over the last couple days. It seems more connected with OS X than Microsoft’s Office ever did. Though, the non-Aqua interface is unfortunate.