News

Free Office compatible software nears release date: RC1 ships today

The release candidate 1 of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now ready for testing. Sadly, the OOorg still refuses to take mobile versions seriously.

"This test release," says the official announcement, "is made available to allow a broad user base to test and evaluate the next major version of OpenOffice.org, but is not recommended for production use at this stage."

Not much ordinary bloggers and journalists can do to help the project, except "spread the word" so here is a bit of word-spreading: "If you are a regular user of OpenOffice.org, here's a great opportunity to help us make the next release the best ever. Download this release from our download page."

From John McCreesh, this optimistic projection of "when will it be released?" 

For OpenOffice.org, 2008 is “The Year of 3″ - the year we release OpenOffice.org Version 3, and broadcast to the world the 3 reasons why they should use the software. We’ve reached the end of the beta test, which has been downloaded by thousands of people around the world. The feedback has been tremendous, and the developers have used it to build the first Release Candidate.

There’s a description of what a Release Candidate is here on the wiki, but if no issues are found, this build could be OpenOffice.org 3. For this reason, I’m carefully monitoring my local mirror for it to appear and looking forward to giving it a try. The Release Notes are already available.

Will OpenOffice.org 3 ship on the originally scheduled date (September 16th?) The latest date is always available here - if I was a betting man, I’d put a small bet on 16th, but a much larger bet on later in the month ;)

he says on his blog today.

But the official view seems to be that mobile uses don't warrant a version. In a slightly patronising tone a couple of years ago, faced with a request, the response was: 

A mobile phone isn't a serious editing platform, a viewer is more practical. I don't think this is something that OOo should be doing as it should be done as another project. The OOo codebase is so large that even if the same thing could be compiled to run on a phone it would be so big and heavy that you would not be able to get it on one.

as if, somehow, when a Word user picks up a Blackberry, they suddenly lose all authority or interest in making changes to the document.

Perhaps mobile users ought to send them a picture or two of a modern, QWERTY-keyboard phone?