[libreoffice-users] Re: LO for a Mac Powerbook G4

On 7/20/12 12:49 PM, Alex Thurgood wrote:
> On 07/20/2012 08:05 PM, Ken Springer wrote:
>
> > Apple doesn't include things similar to Wordpad and the like with their OS.
>
> It does come with TextEdit, a RTF "capable" editor/word processor,
> although I would use that last term lightly.

It's basically a fancy Notepad.  I don't care for it that much.


> > So I'm collecting some software that can be installed by the new owner.
> >    I would install it if this was a Windows machine, but OS X requires
> > the new owner to create the equivalent of an Administrator account with
> > name and password right out of the box.  The Leopard install is brand
> > new, so there's no way I can install the software as I don't know what
> > the eventual username and password will be.
>
> You can actually create several users with admin rights (or at least you
> could, perhaps that has changed ??), then just delete the one that you
> don't want to keep, that way you could install the software you want.

Nothing has changed, but the admin account you create at the first 
bootup is somewhat analogous to the Administrator account that shows up 
in Safe Mode in Windows.

It's this very first account creation you don't want to mess with if the 
folks at my Mac User Group are accurate.  That user name and password 
needs to be set by the new owner, and until you create a username and 
password, you go no further.

> > I think my time with LO is about to expire.  I've filed two bugs which
> > no one seems interested in even dealing with.  They still exist.  And
> > there are others that I've not double checked on for 3.5.x.  I've posted
> > about this "non-attentiveness" before, but if fixing the bugs that are
> > important to me isn't important to the developers, I'm not interested in
> > lending any assistance.  It's a two way street, and I'm not the only one
> > to post about bugs not being fixed prior to adding new features.  I'll
>
> Such is the way with open source, community run projects, especially if
> your reports are OS specific. The plain fact of the matter is that the
> vast majority of the developers of this project are actually coding on
> Linux. As far as I know, there are 3 or 4 developers who regularly use
> Mac OSX, but that's about it. There are no specialist Mac user interface
> coders, nor anyone particularly specialised in the underlying Mac APIs.

AFAIK, my reports would apply to all versions, as neither would be Mac 
interface related/specific.

> Feature development is what makes life interesting for developers on a
> project like this - bug fixing for them is generally not so much fun,
> hence the prioritisation. I can understand your point of view though,
> having looked at alternatives and remained as yet undecided. I'm
> ultimately not prepared to fork out for something that doesn't cater to
> my needs, so I can stick with LO, and try and help it improve in my own
> small way.

Sometime back, Webmaster for Kracked Press posted the question, is LO 
ready for the real world, or words to that effect.  My response may have 
been the only "no".  And for the reasons of low priority on bug fixes. 
The attitude/perspective of the developers needs to be more 
professional, otherwise, LO is just a very good group of hobbyists.  If 
they want to be considered a truly viable alternative to MSO, the needs 
of the users need to come before the desires/wants of the developers. 
The users need to be #1.

> > I have Apple's iWork 09 package, which I consider to be Apple's
> > equivalent to MS Works.  But, there's no database component.  I may go
> > back and work some more with Pages (the word processor) and see if I can
> > get used to it.
>
> Not tried that, or Pages/Sheets/etc, and when I looked at database
> implementations, only found FMPro, which is well out of what my purse
> strings are prepared to pay, even for a small business like mine.

Pages is the word processing portion of iWork, Numbers is the 
spreadsheet.  I'm guessing you mean a spreadsheet with the Sheets 
comment above.

I haven't done a lot of research for OS X databases, but FileMaker has a 
low end database called Bento.  I think that used to be a vendor that FM 
bought out.

I don't know if Appleworks will still run under OS X, or if you need an 
older version of OS X that included the Classic OS 9 interface.

The program I was talking about is Papyrus, http://rom-logicware.com/. 
They had the best office package for the Atari ST/TT computers.  When I 
bought my Win 98 machine, they were just in the beginning processes of 
porting to Windows, and I actually did some beta testing of the doc 
files at the time.  They also had an OS/2 version too.

But I never have tried their way of doing a database, but I suspect it's 
closely tied to using the spreadsheet.

They are currently translating from German in to English of the newest 
version for the Mac, and should be done "at the end of harvest", which I 
take to mean this fall.


--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.6.8
Firefox 14.0.1
Thunderbird 14.0
LibreOffice 3.5.2.2


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