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!

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This one is probably aimed more at the geekier end of the market, but it is an application well worth covering.

There are many reasons why you might want to capture the raw network traffic that is entering and leaving your system. This can be for diagnostic purposes when something has gone wrong, finding out if there’s a rogue program on your network, or if you’re just curious about what communications are going on.

Wireshark (formerly Ethereal) is one of the most well known free software packet capturing and analysis tools available. It is cross platform, and runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and many other Unix-like operating systems.

A basic capture can be started by clicking the leftmost button on the toolbar and then selecting your primary network interface and clicking Start.

From that point on, Wireshark will capture all of the packets that are entering and leaving that interface. You can now get to work as normal, or do some action and come back and analyse the results later.

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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.

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