Branding David

I have been using Mac OS X as my main operating system for nearly a year and a half, and I have found it to be relatively stable, and able to take the high demand I place on it with a fair bit of grace, where other operating systems crumble, break down, and cry after a few hours of dealing with my twenty instances of their web browser and five to ten tabs in each, but what has always been very annoying to me is that Open Office, a free, open source, office platform has never worked natively on my computer. It runs a piece of software before being able to launch that makes the whole process slow, and creates a variety of other limitations.

I have since switched to NeoOffice, which does run natively, but it has always felt like I was using the little brother. So I am happy to announce that Open Office has been massively rewritten, and other than adding new features, they have finally made the software run natively on the Mac platform.

With Aqua being integrated, Open Office 3.0 for Mac not only feels and behaves like a regular Mac application with all the usual bells and whistles, it also is nicely integrated with OS X’s Accessibility API – which results in much better accessibility support than what is offered by most other Mac applications. The re-written code and a native execution environment deliver noticeable performance and reliability improvements.

From TG Daily

Of course the site hasn’t been able to handle the tidal wave of people wanting to get the new version and has been either slow or down all day so far. There are many people trying to mirror the software everywhere, and in two or three days, I am sure it will be easy to get the latest version of Open Office, a great competitor to Microsoft’s wildly overpriced office suite.