Joined: Mar 14, 2006 Posts: 4 Location: Saint Louis, MO, USA, Earth, Sol, Spiral Arm, Milky Way, Universe Prime
Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 9:50 am Post subject: Why NeoOffice over OpenOffice.org Mac Native?
What are the benefits to using NeoOffice, which is still based on the 2.x code of OpenOffice.org, over the Mac-Native OpenOffice.org 3.0?
In my experience, OOo 3 is faster both in loading and responding than NeoOffice. I'm using a late 2007 White SuperDrive MacBook with 4GB of RAM running Leopard, if that makes a difference. _________________ -Chad W Smith
My Blog
Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 10:25 am Post subject: Re: Why NeoOffice over OpenOffice.org Mac Native?
Chad78 wrote:
What are the benefits to using NeoOffice, which is still based on the 2.x code of OpenOffice.org, over the Mac-Native OpenOffice.org 3.0?
In my experience, OOo 3 is faster both in loading and responding than NeoOffice. I'm using a late 2007 White SuperDrive MacBook with 4GB of RAM running Leopard, if that makes a difference.
Really? Maybe OOo 3.0 is faster in some operations but we have not found so in the our performance comparison tests. We would definitely be interested in what things are clearly faster so that we can ensure that such OpenOffice.org performance improvements make it into our next release - NeoOffice 3.0 Early Access.
In any case, I am not going to try to sell anyone on using NeoOffice over OpenOffice.org. If OpenOffice.org 3.0 is fast and stable for you, you do not need support, and (most importantly) you do not use any PowerPC machines, then OpenOffice.org 3.0 is a reasonable choice for you.
In contrast, what we provide is rapid user support. Many people do have questions and having someone there who actually knows the code is of value to those users. Also, being able to get a fix for a serious bug (in many cases within a day or two) is a huge benefit and, we believe, the reason that our users continue to donate to NeoOffice.
Since we are so oriented towards stability and user support, we do not conform to Sun Microsystems' release schedule as we believe that pushing something out that has had only limited testing would mean that our support quality would deteriorate. So, we usually wait to upgrade to newer OpenOffice.org versions as a new OpenOffice.org release is usually quickly followed by a bug fix release or two (OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 appears to already be in the works).
Note: I moved this topic to the Random Whatnot forum since it is not really a rant but is a very valid question.
Neo: The history and evolution and development of a mac-based suite. Patrick and Ed et. al. have been voracious about tweaking and fixing bugs and developing an awesome Application.
Joined: Mar 14, 2006 Posts: 4 Location: Saint Louis, MO, USA, Earth, Sol, Spiral Arm, Milky Way, Universe Prime
Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 11:31 am Post subject:
Okay, the faster I was referring to was a cold start. I started them both at the same time, and OOo opened first. And opening them one at a time, OOo seemed faster, but I didn't time them, so I could be wrong.
For me, they both open far faster than Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office 2007 PowerPoint takes well over a full minute to open for me. Word isn't much faster. I think it has something to do with the large number of fonts I have. (I'm a print and web designer.)
As far as history goes - that doesn't matter to me. If it did, I certainly wouldn't use OpenOffice.org - they pretty much said Mac users don't matter for the better part of a decade. But, I'm a pragmatist. I'm not anti-Microsoft. I'm not anti-LGPL. None of that really matters to me. What matters to me is what works best. I use Bean and OpenOffice.org because they are much faster than MS Office with most of the features I need, but I also keep MS Office around to ensure complete compatibility with clients that use Windows. (And please don't start with the "There is no complete compatibiltiy between MS Office versions" rant - I've heard it, I understand what you mean, but they are far more compatible than reverse-engineered suites.) _________________ -Chad W Smith
My Blog
Okay, the faster I was referring to was a cold start. I started them both at the same time, and OOo opened first. And opening them one at a time, OOo seemed faster, but I didn't time them, so I could be wrong.
What you are doing is forcing two applications to compete for all available Mac OS X resources and Mac OS X is going to dole those resources out more or less randomly.
Also, cold start versus a warm start will make a huge difference for both NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org start times. This is because with a cold start, Mac OS X must read all of the application's binaries from disk and load the binaries into memory for the first time. This is a very intensive process. In contrast, when you do a warm start, Mac OS X has cached those binaries in memory so both NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org (and most any Mac OS X application) will start much faster.
.....But, I'm a pragmatist. I'm not anti-Microsoft. I'm not anti-LGPL. None of that really matters to me. What matters to me is what works best. I use Bean and OpenOffice.org because they are much faster than MS Office with most of the features I need, but I also keep MS Office around to ensure complete compatibility with clients that use Windows....
We are pragmatists too. Microsoft Office is really a very nice office suite and has some really neat features that neither OpenOffice.org nor us have been able to replicate. Our goal is merely to provide a well-supported alternative for those who are willing to trade significantly reduced cost for an office suite that has many but not all of the features of Microsoft Office.
Personally, I really don't consider OpenOffice.org or NeoOffice to be a direct competitor to Microsoft Office. Instead, we operate like AppleWork's did back in its day. Over the last 5 years of operation, that seems to be the niche that we fill and our users' donations allow us to make a modest living supporting that niche.
Joined: Mar 14, 2006 Posts: 4 Location: Saint Louis, MO, USA, Earth, Sol, Spiral Arm, Milky Way, Universe Prime
Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 12:19 pm Post subject:
pluby wrote:
We are pragmatists too.
I'm glad to hear that. But I was referring to the comment from K-9 that a/the reason to choose NeoOffice is "The history and evolution and development of a mac-based suite."
As far as predicting future performance, history is a decent tool. And I have no doubts that NeoOffice will continue to provide great user support and rapid response to its users based on that history. I was one of the most outspoken advocates for NeoOffice over the X11 sub-part pseudo-port of OpenOffice.org for years - including while I was quite active on the OpenOffice.org users/discuss/social/etc. mailing lists. I fought very hard when they first talked about removing the link to NeoOffice from their website, and for a while, it did remain on there. I think until the release of 3.0, if I'm not mistaken.
So, I have no problems with looking at history as far as that goes. But what I'm looking for is right now - not future bugfixes, not user support (I was happy with the OOo users list for "tech support" back when I used it on Windows), but actually the current software -vs- the current software. Are there any features that NeoOffice has that OOo 3.0 does not?
Can NeoOffice use the OOo extensions? Is NeoOffice more stable? Is it more MS Office compatible? Does it support more file formats? Does it come with more templates? That's the kind of information I'm looking for. You don't have to answer each question individually, those were just examples.
The biggest reason I supported NeoOffice over OOo in the past was because it was truly Mac native, more stable, and had a much nicer GUI. Now, OOo 3.0 matches at least 2 of those, (I haven't had problems with either one for stability, so YMMV, but in my experience, they tie that one, too.)
I'm not trying to discredit your work in any way. As I said, I've supported NeoOffice in the past, I believe I may have even donated monitarily in the past, but it's been a while, and I'm not sure about that. But I have definitely promoted its use on my personal blogs, on the OOo mailing lists, and by word of mouth. I appreciate and am grateful for the years NeoOffice has provided what Sun and the OOo community were either unwilling or unable to do until now, and that is provide a truly gold standard Mac native office suite. I'm just looking for the features that separate the two projects today.
(I put this in the rant category because I knew it would be a minefield of a topic, and I'm pretty clumsy in minefields.) _________________ -Chad W Smith
My Blog
The history and development IS an important factor here. They have spent years tweaking and fixing and bettering Neo and they are constantly developing and retweaking on the fly. New apps developed and presented are either good, very good, or they have issues. Well, that is where Neo has gone light years ahead of the others, esp. Neo and the new Lotus symphony or whatever it is called from IBM that you pay for. Having someone that works 7 days a week to tweak and better Neo as Patrick does IS important for the future.
Bean - I tried and removed immediately - too many glitches.
Stability - Neo is it. Never had 1 issue on all of my laptops.
Patrick is currently working on a new release based off of OOo3.0 so that is imminent.
Seems like you are trying to argue more than understand what is, what has been, and where Neo is going.
The tech support around here is truly incredible - no bullshit!
Lastly, if no like - look to other applications.
Re: loading 2 apps simultaneously - Patrick's response is what i immediately thought of. one is competing for resources from the other. How Mac OS X doles it out is shooting craps.
Please try Neo with an open mind - then make comments or make a decision.
So, I have no problems with looking at history as far as that goes. But what I'm looking for is right now - not future bugfixes, not user support (I was happy with the OOo users list for "tech support" back when I used it on Windows), but actually the current software -vs- the current software. Are there any features that NeoOffice has that OOo 3.0 does not?
Have you look at our website? Our NeoOffice Features page contains a list of what you are looking. The list on that page is by no means exhaustive, but it does contain the list of features that we added that were most frequently requested by our users.
Many of these features may seem trivial if you are an infrequent user of NeoOffice or OpenOffice.org, but the amount of requests we had for these (and for things like rendering EPS images) features gives a picture of how varied the needs are for different sets of Mac users.
Chad78 wrote:
Can NeoOffice use the OOo extensions? Is NeoOffice more stable? Is it more MS Office compatible? Does it support more file formats? Does it come with more templates? That's the kind of information I'm looking for. You don't have to answer each question individually, those were just examples.
Sounds like you are writing a product review.
You might want to take a look at our NeoOffice 2.2.5 feature comparison page:
While this compares OpenOffice.org 3.0 Release Candidate 1, the features in that release are identical to those in OpenOffice.org 3.0.
Questions like "is it more stable" I am not going to answer as it is a subjective one. Both NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org are really, really big applications and to assess stability you really have to test all of its functionality. That is something we cannot do and a task that Sun Microsystems has a very difficult time doing.
Another issue is that stability and speed vary widely on whether or not you consider a PowerPC machine a Mac or not. Sun Microsystems only releases Intel builds for Mac OS X. There are community supported PowerPC builds, but we found sizable enough problems when running the OpenOffice.org 3.0 code on PowerPC that we postponed our NeoOffice 3.0 Early Access start date. You or your organization may not care about PowerPC machines, but many schools, non-profit organizations, and individuals still use them for their daily work and one third of our downloads are still consistently PowerPC.
So, instead of chasing after some unmeasurable stability metric, what we have done is focus tons of effort on fixing any crashing bugs and getting that fix back out into our users' hands as fast as possible. I cannot tell you if any of OpenOffice.org's hundreds of open Mac OS X bugs affect stability, but I can say that in the last year the number of crashing bugs that NeoOffice users file has dropped to only about 1 or so per month.
Chad78 wrote:
The biggest reason I supported NeoOffice over OOo in the past was because it was truly Mac native, more stable, and had a much nicer GUI. Now, OOo 3.0 matches at least 2 of those, (I haven't had problems with either one for stability, so YMMV, but in my experience, they tie that one, too.)
Given your "short list" of features, NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org 3.0 are probably a toss up. But that does not mean that they are a toss up for everyone else. I can only imagine the complaints that I would get if we removed EPS image support or removed our "menus available when no documents are open" feature. Many users may not even know or care about these small features, but a great many existing NeoOffice users do.
That gets back to why we exist: choice is a good thing. There are a large number of Mac users out there and there are a great many different things that each user values. We have built our user base and we will continue to support the needs of that user base as best we can. Sun Microsystems will slow build its own user base for OpenOffice.org 3.0 and that is fine. What user base they are chasing after I am not sure but I am pretty confident that their user base will include larger organizations than we normally so I would not be surprised if OpenOffice.org 3.0 adds features that are different than what is in NeoOffice.
Joined: Apr 25, 2006 Posts: 2315 Location: Montpellier, France
Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 1:22 pm Post subject:
Chad78 wrote:
Are there any features that NeoOffice has that OOo 3.0 does not?
Can NeoOffice use the OOo extensions? Is NeoOffice more stable? Is it more MS Office compatible? Does it support more file formats? Does it come with more templates? That's the kind of information I'm looking for.
Joined: Jun 20, 2006 Posts: 2051 Location: Midwest, USA
Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 1:23 pm Post subject:
Good questions!
A while back Ed and Patrick adapted an opensource media browser (by Karelia, I believe), so that NeoOffice users can easily browse their media folders (including iPhoto and iTunes libraries), then insert that media into the NeoOffice documents. To my knowledge, OOo 3.0 has not done the same.
Neo also uses stuff from the odf converter project and the ooo build project, including their docx etc. converters which are better than OOo 2.x's. I don't know how they compare to OOo 3.0.
I frequent the OOo Community Forums Mac OSx forums, and there have been a lot of reports of crashing, hanging, and other problems with OOo 3.0 for Mac. Of course the folks who post there are the ones having problems, so it's impossible to tell from there how large a percentage of users are encountering serious problems with OOo 3.0.
To finish up on the native part: OpenOffice.org 3.0 is native to Mac. NeoOffice is a lot more native.
This goes down into font fallback routines, printing, and PDF optimisations that took Patrick a long time to get right, and only after many people pointed out errors over several years. OpenOffice.org hasn't had that kind of user exposure yet, so I would expect OOo 3.0 to be rougher around the edges than NeoOffice.
I suppose the real comparison of the native code quality will come in three months or so, when Neo 3.0 is up and running.
Best wishes,
Oscar _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Joined: Mar 14, 2006 Posts: 4 Location: Saint Louis, MO, USA, Earth, Sol, Spiral Arm, Milky Way, Universe Prime
Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 3:12 pm Post subject:
Thanks for the links. Those helped a lot.
And, no, I'm not writing a product review, although I've done that sort of stuff in the past, and I sometimes do reviews in my blog, just for fun. But, yeah, that's the mindset I come from, I guess.
Because of the LGPL / GPL differences, I don't suppose OpenOffice.org could just use the enhancements you've made, right? Some of the stuff sounds cool, media browser, having more tools available with no document open, etc.. I don't know how often I would use some of them, but they are good things to have. I would like to see a NeoOffice 3 vs OOo 3 comparison whenever that possible. Is N 3 going to be based on the upcoming 3.0.1 you mentioned, or 3.0.0? I'm guessing from what you said, 3.0.1, but I just want to make sure.
Thanks again for all the helpful responses. I've learned a lot. _________________ -Chad W Smith
My Blog
Because of the LGPL / GPL differences, I don't suppose OpenOffice.org could just use the enhancements you've made, right? Some of the stuff sounds cool, media browser, having more tools available with no document open, etc.. I don't know how often I would use some of them, but they are good things to have. I would like to see a NeoOffice 3 vs OOo 3 comparison whenever that possible. Is N 3 going to be based on the upcoming 3.0.1 you mentioned, or 3.0.0? I'm guessing from what you said, 3.0.1, but I just want to make sure.
If 3.0.1 is out, we'll use that. Upgrading our build from the 3.0 to 3.0.1 code is likely to require minimal effort as there is unlikely to be any massive internal API changes between those two releases.
It is worth noting that we will be using our own existing Mac OS X native code and not Sun's in NeoOffice 3.0 Early Access. As ovvldc's post mentioned, we have put an enormous amount of effort in getting our native Mac OS X code to be crash free and working smoothly within our application.
As for the Sun using our extensions, I do not think LGPL versus GPL is really an issue given that Sun has released several OOo 3.0 extensions (like the PDF import extension) as well as the source code for Java under the GPL license.
Joined: Jan 04, 2005 Posts: 36 Location: Planet Earth
Posted: Sun Nov 16, 2008 5:45 pm Post subject:
I teach writing at a community college and heartily recommend OOo and NeoOffice to my students as a viable alternative to M$ Word, especially those students who have low-cost PC's with M$ Works. I will only accept work via e-mail attachment in .doc, .docx, and .odt formats.
I have both OOo 3.0 and NeoOffice installed right now (they co-exist just fine) because I prefer OOo 3.0's commenting feature, which places the comments off to the right over NeoOffice's "Post-It" note style comments.
Other than that one feature, I find NeoOffice to be much more stable and responsive. I'm looking forward to consolidating down to NeoOffice 3.0 next semester.
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