Planamesa Software has posted the first public beta of NeoOffice/J 2.0, a Mac port of OpenOffice using a Java-based GUI. "NeoOffice 2.0 Aqua Beta 3 offers a significantly enhanced "Aqua" appearance, enhanced international input support, as well as significantly improved overall performance over NeoOffice 1.2. Based on the latest stable OpenOffice.org codebase (2.0.3), this release also include native open and save dialog support for reading and writing files in the international standard ISO 26300 OpenDocument (ODF) file formats."
The icons are too small, the default print layout is too focused on looking like a piece of paper rather than an editing window, and the View/Print Layout menu item seems completely non-functional, and that's just what I noticed in the first 30 seconds after launching the app. It took me another 30 seconds to note the lack of an outline mode and the File/Exit menu item. It took another 30 seconds to quit the application and notice the very strange font in the Save/Don't Save/Cancel dialog box. However, this is still a sizeable improvement over OpenOffice. It's catching up to Microsoft Office, though it's certainly not there yet. Mac OS X 10.3 or later is required. NeoOffice is published exclusively under the GPL.
