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Reader Email #1

Yes, I'm a NeoOffice user.

I can't help wondering whether SideTrack is not contributing to the slow behaviour you describe, which doesn't correspond with my experience - especially on the iMac G5 set-up? Have you tried running NeoOffice without Sidetrack? Your feedback from such a comparison could be a useful contribution to the development forum.

The first launch after a re-start of the computer (of any?) application which depends on java is always longer than any subsequent launch. Since NeoOffice doesn't quit unless you quit it (!), is it possible that, in general, your perception of slow launch time is based on those first "cold" launches?

Of course, there's no doubt that M$ Office launches quicker (at that price, it ought to!) and OpenOffice/NeoOffice are not identical but the choice remains with the end-user. Do they think these 'features' of M$ Office are worth the money? If they can benefit from education prices, probably. Otherwise?

As far as templates are concerned, I couldn't help wondering why you didn't suggest simply downloading the millions of free M$ Office templates of your (readers') desires, open them in NeoOffice and save them in OpenOffice file formats (.sxw, .sxc, .sxi)? As long as the templates don't depend on macros (and who wants to risk downloading a macro-laden M$ Office file anyway?), 99.9% of those templates will appear identical in NeoOffice anyway!

With kind regards,

Ray Saunders
Director, Information Technology
World Scout Bureau

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Reader Email #2

Dear Mr. Kravitz,
First of all, thank you for the review of NeoOffice 1.2. It is always good to see the application get some exposure in the Mac press. With respect to what follows, and just so you know where I am coming from, I have been voluntarily beta testing and offering user support (off and on - off at the moment due to "real world" pressures) for NeoOffice since version 0.7 so I obviously have an element of bias in what I'm about to say about the product. Take that as you will, but I will try to be balanced with my comments.

I'm going to have to ask you to supply some qualifications to your review that may clear up a few inconsistencies between your experience with the app and mine. Along the way, I will also be providing you with some tips and hints that you may like to add to your review which will improve the user-experience of NeoOffice should any of your readers decide to try it out.

To begin with, you fail to state how much RAM you are using in your Macs. The biggest performance hit on NeoOffice, by far, is the amount of RAM it needs to run *well*. If you only have 384MB to 512MB RAM, while NeoOffice is usable, you are going to experience reduced performance due to the increased potential for memory swapping. In my own usage of the app, with 768MB to 1GB of RAM, I have experienced very good performance (in relative terms - there are places where NeoOffice does slow down quite badly, see below). I would say that 768MB to 1GB+ is the "sweet spot" for RAM when using NeoOffice, though this is dependent on what other apps you use and how much RAM they require. I can only assume that some of the performance issues you describe are due to a lack of available RAM as my Mac is in between the two you described using in the article (a PowerBook G4 1.5GHz, 1GB RAM) and I perceive NeoOffice to be mostly quite snappy for me (except for the instances I will describe further below).

(I tested on an iBook G4/1.07Ghz with 768 MB of RAM - nk)

Wrt (sic) to scrolling - while NeoOffice isn't perfect (or necessarily all that great) at this, I can't say that I have experienced problems as severe as you have. I use NeoOffice everyday for a spreadsheet that is currently 490+ rows long, and I also have a 196 page long text document for testing purposes - scrolling isn't exactly smooth as butter or fast, but I certainly don't experience the window redraws you describe in your review (Tip - to improve your scrolling experience drag the scrollbar button rather than use the arrows or scrollwheel on your mouse). In comparison, the same text document in Word 2004 does scroll a bit better but again, it is far from smooth as butter. The one area where it does scroll a lot better than NeoOffice is when using the scrollbar arrows. However, the performance is still quite comparable when scrolling by other means (in other words, quite jerky!). Similarly with pasting text from other apps - there is very little delay for me on my mac. For example I copied your article from OmniWeb to a blank document in both NeoOffice and Word 2004. NeoOffice was possibly marginally slower than Word in displaying the pasted text, but not by very much if it was. This is a typical experience of mine and not abnormal.

However, from my experience, the following are well known performance problems with NeoOffice (but for some there are ways of improving things):

1. Launch time - yes this is quite slow to horribly so and probably the worst aspect of NeoOffice (IMO). However, the speed of the launch is highly dependent on the number of fonts that you have active on your system - if you watch the splash screen as it loads, you will notice a pause in the loading at about two-thirds through as this is when the fonts are loaded (the need to load all fonts at this stage is apparently a limitation imposed by the OpenOffice.org codebase). The more fonts, the longer this pause. If you use Font Book to disable any fonts you don't regularly use, you can dramatically improve the launch time of NeoOffice, especially if you previously had hundreds of fonts active that you didn't really use. Note though, even with a greatly reduced set of active fonts, the launch time is still going to be far slower than that of Office or Pages.

2. First display of menus - the first time you select a menu from the menubar or within the app it has a noticeable pause before display. However, subsequent menu selections (not of the same menu alone but of all menus) should be rapid. This has something to do with the way Patrick has to had to implement the menu drawing code through Java (which I can't begin to describe but the consequence is that the first menu display is always slower).

3. Slow menu display still? If you are seeing persistent slow display of menus, then it is possible that other software on your Mac is the cause of this. One tester of the 1.2 betas discovered that running SETI and/or Folding@Home were the cause of this issue for him.

4. Presentation - some of the transitions perform very badly in NeoOffice (not so badly in OpenOffice.org for X11, so this seems to be a consequence of the Java backend to NeoOffice and the Aqua native display). IIRC, diagonal slide transitions are quite jerky. The solution for now is to keep things simple and avoid those transitions that cause such problems (not a bad thing as most slide transitions tend to be more distracting than helpful in presentations anyway ;-) ).

5. Calc - chart display can lag a little (again an OpenOffice.org problem, not specific to NeoOffice per se). No solution or tips to this. I don't have enough experience of complex equations to know if their performance is as bad as you say it is but I do know from the support forums and NeoOffice bugzilla that there are some performance problems with Calc. However, the underlying problem is likely to be in OpenOffice.org and not something specific to NeoOffice. Perhaps this is something that has improved in OpenOffice.org 2.0?

6. Window re-drawing. Yes it happens and there is no solution but this is unfortunately another problem inherited from OpenOffice.org and it is not something Patrick can solve with ease. Incidentally, NeoOffice/J-1.1 didn't exhibit this problem because Patrick had to work around a bug in Java 1.3.1 that led to him doing offscreen drawing of the display before it was displayed onscreen. This actually caused more memory to be used by NeoOffice/J-1.1 and the performance to be worse but it was an essential action to avoid the bug. Even though the redraws are uglier than what happened in NeoOffice/J-1.1 the benefit is better performance in NeoOffice 1.2 overall.

Onto other things:

Wrt to the ugliness of the app - this can be improved upon. If you visit the trinity Developer forum, there is a long thread there entitled "NeoOffice GUI" - if you read this thread you will see an application called NeoIconer being discussed. This app allows you to change the toolbar icons so e.g. you can have your toolbar look like this - which, while not great, is a big improvement over the default Win95ish icons:

This is more complicated than it should be at the moment but once again, the way OpenOffice.org 1.x was developed didn't make changing toolbar icons easy (or working out how to do it either, as the trinity thread will show!). Hopefully, if and when NeoOffice starts using OpenOffice.org 2.0 as its codebase then using different icon sets will potentially be a lot easier (as it is in OpenOffice.org 2.0 itself).

As well as the icons, there are other aspects of the application that may not gel very well with a Mac user's expectations. For example the open/save dialogues are currently not native Mac ones - this is something that will hopefully be modified in future versions of the app, but unfortunately it is not a trivial change to code. Other non-Mac like behaviour occurs in the keyboard commands for e.g. moving the cursor to the end of lines of text etc but this is also true of MS Office which also doesn't follow the Mac OS X UI conventions. However, it is surprising how quickly you can adapt to these differences and get used to them. It'd be better if they could be changed, but this isn't going to happen unless something radical happens with OpenOffice.org itself ;-)

I'd like to use this opportunity to comment on compatibility with MS Office - it is good but it isn't perfect. There are problems with e.g. the way tables are constructed in OpenOffice.org versus Office that can cause problems; MS Office's poor support for unicode text input is another - this can cause problems with the display of e.g. symbol characters in .doc files. The good news is that NeoOffice is actually a lot better for some things than MS Office. Support for unicode text is far superior and the ability to use right-to-left text input is also a lot better (which means that NeoOffice or OpenOffice.org is a better choice than Mac MS Office for e.g. Arabic or Hebrew users). I think I am right in saying that it also has more non-English dictionaries available so it is a better bet for some international users too. Another area where NeoOffice is far superior to MS Office (but not quite as good as Apple's Pages) is styling. I find Office to be absolutely dreadful when it comes to managing and using styles for your text. Happily, NeoOffice is pretty good and offers an easy to use interface for this feature.

There are other aspects I could comment on but I'll leave it at the above as this is probably going to end up being longer than your review! ;-) One important point to make though is that NeoOffice can't be used on the Intel Macs - unfortunately, it falls into a class of apps that Rosetta doesn't support. If your readers are on Intel Macs at all, then they will have to use OpenOffice.org 2.0 in X11 for the moment. Another important point is that many tips and hints on how to use NeoOffice can be found in the NeoWiki (http://neowiki.sixthcrusade.com/index.php/Main_Page). There is also a good support forum at Trinity (http://trinity.neooffice.org) though be patient as the people helping out there are all volunteers doing it for love and not money...

In conclusion, I would like to comment on your rating. While I wouldn't have used your methodology to get to it I would say your final rating is a fair one (I think the app itself deserves 4 stars out of 5 if we take MS Office out of the equation - 3 stars if we don't due to compatibility issues - it has more features than 90% of users would ever want, it has good but not perfect integration with OS X and it is freely available).

Cheers,
Jonathan
(JKT at the trinity forums)

P.S. A comment on stability - it is actually quite amazing just how stable NeoOffice is and pretty much always has been. Even though I have tested pretty much all the betas and patches since version 0.7, many quite extensively, and a heck of a lot of the underlying code has changed since then (both NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org wise), the number of times the application has crashed on me is barely at the forty to fifty mark and to be honest I think even that is far too high an estimate. This is a testament to the quality of the work that Patrick Luby has done on the product along with that of Ed Peterlin and that of the OpenOffice.org for X11 folks.

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