FOSSwire

Have you ever been in a situation where you desperately need a copy of a font for something you're working on, but you can only seem to find a copy in the wrong format? Often this can happen, and you have the font elsewhere, but it's not in the standard .ttf format you expect.

If you're dealing with a font that has originated on a Macintosh, it might be a font packaged in the .dfont format. This format is Mac-specific and it allows multiple variants of the same font (or even different fonts entirely) to be packaged inside one file and therefore transported more easily, along with Mac-specific metadata... between Macs that is.

Thankfully, there is an open source tool called fondu available for Unix systems that allows you to take one of these dfont files and split it into the individual ttf files it contains. Once you have the .ttf, it is then trivial to add this into your ~/.fonts directory on Linux and use it natively.

On my Ubuntu system, I was able to simply sudo apt-get install fondu, but if a package is not available for your operating system, you can get the source code and compile it yourself.

Once fondu is installed, this is how you use it:

$ fondu name_of_dfont_file.dfont

It will extract the font file into its constituent parts. As well as TTF files, you might notice other files which won't probably be of much use. However, the net result is that you'll get what you want - TTF files that you can now make use of in pretty much any operating system you want.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta is now out, and available to download. It has been a long time coming now, and one of the big new features being trumpeted is native Mac support.

I thought I would cross over to Mac OS X for this FOSSwire post, to compare the new native OpenOffice.org there to an unofficial fork called NeoOffice that has offered native support for a while now. I'll explain more about that later.

Whatever your views on the Mac platform, FOSS support on platforms other than Linux is undeniably important, so going over to view OOo from that perspective is something I think that is good to do. So let's get started!

What's NeoOffice?

For those who don't know, NeoOffice is a fork of the original OpenOffice.org code that started in 2003. Its aim was to bring the office suite natively over to the Mac platform.

The reason why this was necessary is that OpenOffice.org was written basically to run under two windowing environments - it ran under Windows natively, and used X11 for Unix systems. While it certainly is possible to run X11 on Mac OS X and therefore run OpenOffice.org, it hardly provided a good user experience, and made it a right pain to do.

For lots of different reasons, the official project wouldn't devote the time and resources to doing the Mac port, so a group of developers took the OOo source code and made their own derivative just for the Mac, called NeoOffice.

The differences between the two versions aren't just code and branding, however. The NeoOffice distribution is available only under the GPL, whereas OOo official has other licensing options available.

This meant that when the official team focused their attention on a Mac port, all the hard work that the NeoOffice guys had done on getting their Mac port going couldn't be introduced back into the core source code, due to the licence differences.

Differences Between OOo 3.0b and NeoOffice

Anyway, enough politics. Apart from the new features in OOo 3.0, what are the differences between the two native Mac implementations?

Speed

This might be just down to the official build's general speed improvements, but OOo is miles faster to cold start that NeoOffice.

The NeoOffice interface actually uses Java as a bridge to get to the Aqua user interface, as far as I'm aware, OOo doesn't. Taking Java out of the equation might be one of the elements speeding it up.

Once you're actually in the app, however, the speed of both apps is comparable, apart from in one area.

Using the mouse wheel to scroll through a document is relatively speedy in NeoOffice (albeit not as smooth as most apps), but right now is very sluggish and a bit disappointing in the OOo beta. Hopefully this should be addressed by the final release.

Interface

Branding differences aside, the two applications generally look and feel mostly the same. NeoOffice does have a custom icon set that looks more Aqua-ish, but OOo's one isn't bad either.

Dialogues and windows generally use the same layout across the two distributions. From a Mac user experience perspective, many of them still feel a bit 'Windows-like' and thus may put off the Mac user, but that is something largely unavoidable without rewriting a lot of the application.

Fonts on buttons and in interface elements do look better in OOo, in my opinion, but still look obviously out of place with other Mac applications. Again, this is pretty much something unavoidable without a completely separate app for Mac OS X - something quite infeasible and a bit unreasonable.

Functionality

Functionally, there is little difference between the two, apart, obviously, from the new features offered in the new version of OOo.

Which One Is Better?

If you're not bothered about being 'official' to OOo, I would recommend that Mac users wanting to use the Free office suite stick with NeoOffice (unless you want to run a beta).

The stability provided by NeoOffice is pretty good in my experience, and the beta credentials of the official build mean that for important stuff, it's probably worth sticking with 2.2.3 right now.

There is very little to choose between the two implementations. Once OOo3.0 has matured and the final release is made (and therefore stability can be guaranteed), it might have just enough in terms of speed and subtle improvements to sway you in that direction.

Provided that the laggy scrolling issue can be dealt with, of course.

Give It a Spin Yourself!

Anyone wanting to try the new OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta can download it and give it a try, while NeoOffice can be downloaded for Mac OS X only.

We focus quite a lot on Linux stuff here at FOSSwire, which is fine, because it is a very important open source system, but it's easy to forget that there are other platforms out there, and even if the platform itself isn't open source, there are plenty of applications you can be using which are.

In this post, I'm going to run through five top open source applications for Mac OS X.

#1 - Growl

Growl is an amazing piece of software. At heart, it is an open source notification system for OS X. All sorts of different applications can plug in to the functionality it provides, and display popup notifications on your desktop. It is fully customisable, with different themes for the notifications. Support for Growl is extensive across many Mac apps - open and proprietary, with plugins available for many Apple shipping applications that don't have support too.

At the time of writing, their site is down/unreliable, so snagging the download link directly can be a pain. However, Growl is included with Adium (the next application I'm going to look at), so keep reading to get yourself a copy.

#2 - Adium

Adium is a multi-network instant messaging client which is fully extensible and customisable with plugins. It is notable for its use of libpurple, the same underlying IM code that powers Windows and Linux program Pidgin.

It supports more IM networks than you can shake a stick at and there is a lively community of people who work on plugins called Xtras. Xtras allow you to completely customise the look, feel and behaviour of your chat client. If iChat isn't giving you enough - or you're stuck using a second rate official client for an obscure network, Adium is a great choice.

Download Adium (includes Growl)

#3 - MacPorts

If you're a hardcore Unix junkie, using OS X can be frustrating as there isn't an easy way to pull down software packages automatically like there is in almost all Linux distributions and plenty of other Unixes too. It's perfectly possible to download and compile everything yourself, but this can be tiresome, especially if what you're installing has a lot of dependencies.

Enter MacPorts. MacPorts provides you with a command line package manager which you can use in a similar way to apt or yum, for example. It ships with built-in repositories for pretty much everything most people will need, but you can add third-party repositories if necessary. If you're a Unix person at heart, MacPorts can make the Mac experience that much easier.

MacPorts.org

Also check out Porticus, which is a GUI for the MacPorts command line tool.

#4 - Smultron

OK, so this one is sort of a programmer's thing, but it is such a good app in my opinion I'm going to include it. Smultron is a programmer's text editor, with full syntax highlighting and other features such as split window view, tabs, command line scripting, AppleScript, find as you type and more.

It is a formidable competitor to some of the commercial and proprietary programmer's text editors on the Mac, and for many uses it can be a vital tool in your arsenal. The latest version is Leopard only (so that it can take advantage of the latest features), but older versions can also be downloaded for Tiger.

Because it is Mac-specific, it integrates well and provides a good Mac-like experience, rather than sacrificing that for platform independence.

Smultron

#5 - Camino

Firefox on the Mac is a little, well... rubbish. It integrates poorly, is slow and bloated and generally doesn't really feel like it fits in. Equally, Safari doesn't give you the compatibility and power that the open source Gecko rendering engine provides either.

Camino is a browser built on top of Mozilla's Gecko, but with a completely native shell built in Apple's Cocoa. The result is a browser that is fast, looks good, and behaves like a proper Macintosh application should, while still giving you the advantages of having Firefox's rendering code running underneath.

The only caveat (other than a curious lack of auto-updating facility) is you don't get Firefox's extensions, which can be one of the reasons for using Firefox over Safari in the first place. If you're not bothered about that, though, give Camino a try.

Camino

Wrap up

There are plenty more open source gems out there for the Mac, so if you think there's something worthy of mentioning, feel free to leave a note in the comments!