Who loves you?
by Volker Weber
As I was reading Simon Phipp's weblog today but could not help but notice this:
all my filtering is done by Apple's Mail application on OS X. It does a really good job, but still plenty gets through the defences.
So Simon is using a Mac. I can't really say that it surprises me very much since I have great respect for him and expect him to make smart choices. Simon was one of the people who helped introduce both Java and XML at IBM. Since mid-2000 he is with Sun Microsystems as their chief technology evangelist.
If it were not for Ute, I would still be using PCs only. She got me Lucy for Christmas. And who loves you?
Comments
Yes, I 'switched' back in March - I am now using my old Thinkpad T20 to run Sun Java Desktop System (aka MadHatter), which it does very well. I have a 15" PowerBook G4 which I totally love - a full strength Unix system with a desktop GUI so good you rarely need to resort to the command line. To my surprise I haven't regretted the switch for a moment (I expected at least a little pain) and we now have an iMac for home as well. There are plenty of Mac users around Sun, pretty much all the execs use them - James Gosling is a big fan, for example - and while Java Desktop is in its infancy I expect usage to grow.
I know a few people who are looking forward to a native OpenOffice for the Mac. It's good to hear that Sun executives might share this desire.
Yes, a native version would be great, but I must say that having persevered with the Darwin version - OOo 1.0.3 - I am now pretty happy with it.
I found it almost looks and behaves like a native version if I run it under OroborOSX, which is a neat little X-Window system for the Mac. And I got my Windows TTF fonts installed so OOo can use them too in the mean time, so for now I'm satisified and can wait until the native port is finished :-)
What is the reason, you are not using Apple's X? That should be in Panther as well, if I remember correctly.
The release notes for OOo mentioned one or two potential problems with the Apple X11 Beta 3, and being no expert in UNIX or X11, I decided to use the option which seemed to be recommended by the OOo team (most of the screen shots in the readme.pdf show the OroborOSX icon).
When I originally installed OOo on Ruth's PowerBook, either OroborOSX wasn't being packaged with OOo or I happened to choose a different option and we had a very clunky XDarwin installation, which we really didn't like. I have also moved Ruth's machine to OroborOSX. The version packaged with OOo when I downloaded it was 0.82b, the release notes mention some users having probems with crashes and recommend upgrading to 0.8.5, which I did - no problems so far.
