I just downloaded the brand-spanking new
Neo Office Aqua Beta and I have to say, I'm impressed.
I have been using Open Office and Text Edit exclusively since I purchased my MacBook back at the beginning of summer. I couldn't bring myself to install the non-universal binary Office 2004 on my brand new laptop. And I paid for it.
That is until I downloaded Neo Office Aqua just about an hour ago. Allow me to elaborate.
I am a fan of open source software. It is a mark of creativity and a demonstartion of technical prowess to design and create a functioning piece of software as elaborate as a desktop publishing suite. Microsoft set the bar very high (admittedly they have had about twenty years to refine the Word interface) as far as office suite programs are concerned and it is unfair to not give them credit where credit is due. But an equal amount of praise goes out to the open source competitors to Office, they have all worked very hard. Neo Office Aqua is far and away the leader of the pack as far as the OS X open source office suite programming race is concerned.
My Gripes About Text Edit
Lack of formatting buttons for easy access
Poor visualization features
Poor document fidelity (when opening documents from other, non-RTF formats)
My Gripes About Open Office
It is linked to X11
X11 causes it to be sllllooooooowww to open
X11 causes problems with quitting the program
X11 causes problems with following the cursor between windows
Because it doesn't quit well, I get a document recovery screen every time I open OO
The traditional Mac keyboard shortcuts do not work
Saving into a .doc format is hit or miss
The user interface is not OS X pretty, nor is it Office pretty (its an eye sore all around)
I had used Neo Office before, when it first started making waves a year or two back. Its Java foundation, freeing it from X11, was all around amazing. Including amazingly slow. Other than that, it was exactly the same as OO.
The current Neo Office Aqua (which I have been using only for a few hours now) has me stunned. It addresses almost all of my gripes listed above. It opens faster than before, faster than Open Office (even without the X11 opening time), but no where near as fast as TextEdit. It has been spiffed up with a softer more OS X looking interface with slightly more colorful icons and all the other OS X standard looks (scroll bars, pull tabs, fonts, etc.). It now accepts Apple keyboard shortcuts WHICH IS HUGE. For some reason, when I sit at a windows computer the control-z, control-a, control-s, alt-f4, etc. all make sense. When I sit at an Apple computer, the open apple analogs make sense. With OO, I kept stumbling over seeing OSX on my computer but having to hit XP commands on my keyboard. It sucked, but Neo Office Aqua has rectified this, and none too soon.
Heck, they've even made a brand new aqua beach ball!
That, combined with being able to use all of OO's features in the intuitive sense (finding them in the toolbar at the top of the screen) makes using Neo Office Aqua a great experience.
I hope that OO can do one better by making their suite naturally Aqua, but while I wait Neo Office Aqua will be sitting in my .doc
