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Wishlist of Applications I'd like to see ported to Aqua

Sneeper

Sneeper

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 5, 2004
113
0
San Francisco
There are several programs which would greatly benefit from a port to the Aqua windowing system (whether it's Cocao or not). Here is my wishlist:

OpenOffice (slated in 2006 with 2.0)
Abiword (Aqua port currently in 'development' branch)
Gnumeric (no plans to port to aqua :()
Gnucash (no plans to port to aqua)
Gimp (I've heard it's in the works, but can't find any project page for the port)

Yes, I love free software. All of these currently run on OS X under X11.. but that's not good enough, dammit! Also, many of these have dependencies which I think should go away.. statically compile them in and make it all one .app bundle you can drag into Applications.

Anyone have anything to add, or have their own list?
 
DIYDS

sure, we'd all love to pay nothing for great software that requires little to no technical knowledge to install and/or use... if you know anything about programming/UI/etc the developers of these apps would appreciate your contribution to their OSS projects. otherwise, i hope you like X11 :)
 
PlaceofDis said:
i really want to see OpenOffice finished for Aqua :)
Click to expand...

Im also really looking forward to OpenOffice for Aqua. I fell in love with it before I switched. Now, ironically, I may have to turn back to MS for word processing. I know that people produce it out of the goodness of their hearts alone, but I can't wait until they get an Aqua version out the door!

Charlie
 
It amazes me Apple hasn't quietly put 10-20 engineers on Open Office for the Mac.

Don't need to piss off MS. Don't take credit for it. Just do it. Quietly.

And I understand the argument that it's good for Apple to have MS make a lot of money selling Office for the Mac so they continue the product, but this is an investment in the future. Even if the product is amazing and the file formats are fully compatible, MS will still make a ton of money for years to come on Office Mac since it will take a long time for people to switch.
 
BWhaler said:
It amazes me Apple hasn't quietly put 10-20 engineers on Open Office for the Mac.

Don't need to piss off MS. Don't take credit for it. Just do it. Quietly.

And I understand the argument that it's good for Apple to have MS make a lot of money selling Office for the Mac so they continue the product, but this is an investment in the future. Even if the product is amazing and the file formats are fully compatible, MS will still make a ton of money for years to come on Office Mac since it will take a long time for people to switch.
Click to expand...

Umm, microsoft will just change the format to make OpenOffice keep up, just Apple will do with AAC now that it has been reversed engineered by Real. Do you see an endless cycle?
 
Finder

I'd like to see a cocoa Finder :eek: imagine that, I think it tells a tale that maybe OS X is heading in a direction where the Mac Finder is no longer relevant. I'd still like to see if a Cocoa Finder would sort out the lumpy parts of the carbon Finder.
 
superbovine said:
Umm, microsoft will just change the format to make OpenOffice keep up, just Apple will do with AAC now that it has been reversed engineered by Real. Do you see an endless cycle?
Click to expand...

Not sure this is going to work anymore.

Companies and consumers don't upgrade like they used to. Plus, CIO's always hated when MS did this, and in the past they just had to deal with MS's games since they had little choice. This is no longer the case.

It boils down to the fact that MS no longer has the throttle hold they once had on the industry.
 
BWhaler said:
It amazes me Apple hasn't quietly put 10-20 engineers on Open Office for the Mac.
Click to expand...

I thought about that as well. They could just work on it and don't tell anybody.

Beside that I would like to see an update to AppleWorks.
 
Eliminate Office for Macs, and the number of switchers drops dramatically.

Potential switcher looks into switching to Mac, finds that MS doesn't release a version of Office for Mac anymore, a program that he and his kids use all the time, and boom, no more switcher. They could do lots of research and realize that OpenOffice exists, read up on OpenOffice, but the large majority of people wouldn't bother searching.

And even if OpenOffice was preinstalled on Macs, and it's advertised as a fully compatible product to MS Office, many people would still be reluctant to buy an expensive computer only to find out if this is true or not.

So no, lets not hope that Apple produces an "Office killer." Office is still the standard, and it's Mac presence makes Apple computers more attractive. Eliminating standard software (that's not bad) just because you don't like MS for whatever reason is dumb if it will hurt Apple sales in any way. This could only hurt Mac sales, mostly because it can't help sales. People won't see Office availability and turn to Dell instead.
 
AUTOCAD - I can't tell you how many designers HATE using PCs but are forced to because of this program
 
Matlab

Pspice (Ported to Mac os X) (If someone knows a good replacement... tell me)

Openoffice ... but would rather have an appleworks update
 
aricher said:
AUTOCAD - I can't tell you how many designers HATE using PCs but are forced to because of this program
Click to expand...

Autocad would be cool. Back in the day, I ran ACAD R12 on Sun Sparcstations.

The problem now with porting Autocad is that many people use the vertical apps that go on top of Acad, such as Land Desktop, Architectural Desktop, CaIce, etc. Porting all that stuff would probably be pretty time consuming I'm afraid.
 
AutoCAD would be great, but I want to see some 3D CAD apps (Pro/E, SolidWorks (?), etc.) A lot of these already run on *nix, so it shouldn't be too hard. I know that some major kernel is available for OS X, but currently no one is building anything on top of it.
 
aricher said:
AUTOCAD - I can't tell you how many designers HATE using PCs but are forced to because of this program
Click to expand...

AutoDesk are probably still trying to decide whether to develop AutoCAD for Mac OS X--two years later. I can't imagine that the well-defined and well-integrated interface (ha!) would be any better on a Macintosh.

I'd like to see Lotus SmartSuite ported since WordPro is the only word processor I've found to actually do what I want, easily and quickly. Other than that, I haven't seen much software that is even interesting enough to port.

kettle:

You know that Finder isn't going to be better just by being written in Objective-C. It's a poor design and no computer language/framework is going to fix that.
 
bousozoku said:
AutoDesk are probably still trying to decide whether to develop AutoCAD for Mac OS X--two years later. I can't imagine that the well-defined and well-integrated interface (ha!) would be any better on a Macintosh.
.
Click to expand...

What? Confusing Autocad interface?? Never!
 

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BWhaler said:
Not sure this is going to work anymore.

Companies and consumers don't upgrade like they used to. Plus, CIO's always hated when MS did this, and in the past they just had to deal with MS's games since they had little choice. This is no longer the case.

It boils down to the fact that MS no longer has the throttle hold they once had on the industry.
Click to expand...

what throttle are you talking about?
 
bux said:
gimp, eh?

What about this: http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/ ? :D
Click to expand...

From that link:
Gimp.app requires Apple's X11.app.
Click to expand...
If it requires X11, it's not OS X native. The thread's discussing porting to the Aqua windowing system, not X11 work-arounds.

603 said:
sure, we'd all love to pay nothing for great software that requires little to no technical knowledge to install and/or use... if you know anything about programming/UI/etc the developers of these apps would appreciate your contribution to their OSS projects. otherwise, i hope you like X11 :)
Click to expand...
I wasn't aware that open-source projects were only intended to benefit those with the expertise to contribute to them. I have also heard it argued that one of the advantages of open-source is that if there's enough of a demand for something, a programmer is likely to be working on it somewhere.
 
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