Over at a Sun Microsystems blog there’s news that Sun will be joining the effort to make an OS X-native port of OpenOffice.org, the kick-ass open-source office suite (link).
I’m excited to let you all know that as of now Sun engineering will add its support to the ongoing Mac/Aqua porting effort.
The MacOSX porting history is basically as old as OpenOffice.org itself. Practically from the start there was the plan to have a native version for Mac, however as a first step the community decided to produce an X11 port which – since OOo already had several X11 ports from the start – seemed to be a good way to get a version quickly as temporary solution. As usual the “temporary solution” tended to be quite long lived (year 2000 bug anyone :-) ?).
Some may ask: Why is Sun joining the Mac porting project? If you look around at conferences and airport lounges, you will notice that more and more people are using Apple notebooks these days. Apple has a significant market share in the desktop space. We are supporting this port because of the interest and activity of the community wanting this port. … Add in the growing Mac community as a whole and suddenly from Sun’s point of view Mac has a higher value since our strategy is to be multi-platform capable.
I use the X11 port that he mentions when I need to make/open a spreadsheet, or on the unlikely chance that TextEdit won’t do the trick for what I’m writing.
Elsewhere in the blogonet, Developing Intelligence has a neat post on synesthesia and the binding problem, which is the second in a series on binding (following yesterday’s post about parietal lobe-lesion patients, and anticipating tomorrow’s post about the hypothesized role of attention in binding). Synesthesia is one of my favorite topics, since I sorta have it, but the results of the study reviewed are interesting in their own right, so it’s worth a look.
Badges
my name is dave
and this is my blog.
-
Flickr
More Photos -
Recent Comments
No Comments Yet