It's bloody slow on my PowerBook G4. I'm waiting for the updated NeoOffice.

The OpenOffice site itself is struggling but it can be picked up direct from the major mirror sites without any problems.

Geoff.

>It's bloody slow on my PowerBook G4. I'm waiting for the updated NeoOffice

I'm surprised it works at all. It's supposed to be for Intel-Only Macs.

Works great here on my Macbook.

Up yours, Gates & Ballmer !

Although I have a more recent Intel Mac and not a G4, I've been running OOo3 since one of the first betas, and apart from a few hicups, it's been running brilliantly.

Not I'm just waiting for the stampede to stop before getting the final version.

It's downloading fine for me...

"For now, going to BitTorrent and waiting until the weekend to download the software, after the rush will surely have passed, seem the most sensible options."

The advantage of bit torrent is that it's faster when more people are downloading, so why wait until after the rush.

My plans to buy MS Office for my new MacBook just went out of the window.

The 'chore' of installing X11? Come on, that's as easy as pie. It's worth it anyway, because if you want to use some other tools like The Gimp you'll need X11 too.

I am using the native beta at the moment, and will upgrade as soon as the rush-hour traffic has past ;-)

I note that Fedora, for one, recommend that you use BitTorrent. Now, if only someone could explain how to do it....

Sorry to say, but there is not a single seeder for the version I need. Not a single one. Download works just fine, coming in at nice and steady 7mbit+, matter of.... done, there it is.

the darn buggers hid a 2.4.1 behind the link without stating it, said "download" just like the other 3.0 ones. Well, thanks then, come again when the PPC version is ready.

Word Comments (Notes in OO lexicon) and track changes works properly at last! Fantastic!

As a user of OO2.4, I won't be upgrading until a proper version of English is on there.

American != English.

2.4 is great, I have high hopes for 3.0. At least they haven't implemented all the ribbon-bar shite!

I'm in the jungle, sharing a 2048bit/s link with 600 other people in the camp, on a system that only allows http, not even smtp/pop or ftp. I'll be waiting about a month to download, which should give at least one other person a chance...

It might be 3.1 by then, of course

Please note the plural of the word "options" there, so I guess they meant BitTorrent OR waiting.

I've downloaded and installed a copy of the 'American' version (via one of the mirror servers), and it displays "English (UK)" at the bottom of the text document window. Not really had a chance to play with it yet but on this Intel Mac it's running well.

And it must be "going to BitTorrent OR waiting for the weekend"...John needs to brush up on his Boolean logic :)

Use the Opera web browser, click on torrent link and save just like you would any other download.

I just got OO3 via the torrent in less than ten minutes :-)

@ Samsara and Bad Beaver

It's available on mirror sites but, for some reason, not on the home site.

I got mine here:

http://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/3.0.0rc4/

Just scroll down; you'll find it.

Installs and works like a charm!

@The BigYin

The same site has versions for both Intel and PPC labeled "*_Install_en-GB.dmg", so I'm guessing that you should be good to go.

Strange... I downloaded dev300_m31 just last week, but now the whole m31 directory is gone from the mirrors. Hopefully it will show up in stable soon. It's nice, but still needs the same old tweaks to get decent performance: reduce the number of undo history steps, increase graphics cache, turn off the Java runtime environment.

Just maybe.

There is something else about OpenOffice.org 3.0 that I think your readership will find VERY interesting.

OpenOffice.org is the first application that is multi-platform accessible, exposing a rich set of information to assistive technologies on Windows, Solaris, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X (Intel-based Macs only). OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the first version to run natively on Mac OS X that will have the look and feel of an Aqua application while supporting the Mac OS X accessibility APIs, and integrating well with the built-in Macintosh VoiceOver screen reader - offering better accessibility support than many other applications available for Mac OS X.

“Sun and the OpenOffice.org community take accessibility very seriously, whether in schools, in the home, in the workplace or in government institutions. An accessible solution for editing documents, spreadsheets, and creating presentations is of vital importance to the hundreds of millions of people worldwide with disabilities,” said Peter Korn, accessibility architect at Sun Microsystems and co-chair of the OASIS OpenDocument accessibility subcommittee. “We have listened and responded to the community and our engineering efforts are a direct result of the requests we’ve received from the user community and exemplifies the innovation and success of the many open source initiatives at Sun and OpenOffice.org.”

<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/pub/1/b44/b25">Thomas Wlodkowski Director of Accessibility at AOL</a>

"As a blind consumer who uses Mac OS 10 to carry out daily office tasks, I was pleased to see the progress that the OpenOffice.org community has made in addressing compatibility with Apple's VoiceOver screen reader. It is reassuring to know that consumers with disabilities will be able to move between computer platforms and enjoy equivalent access to applications that are critical to basic job performance."

###

The download was fine, the software is great. Some good improvements over 2.4. The language is definitely UK English, it spotted the errors with "neighbor" "color" and "Bush is a great President".

All in all, a nice successor in the OpenOffice range.

Mine's the one with the Concise OED in the inside pocket.

Downloaded it yesterday - no problems. Installation was simple and completely uneventful.

Had a problem with a document that the useless Office 2008 Word wouldn't work with (it was a form where a field was locked and Word wouldn't unlock). It worked perfectly with Open Office 3.

This was my first ever experience with OO and I was very impressed. Even the Powerpoint application had no problems with some presentations that Powerpoint 2008 shagged (it "blanked" some slides).

At last there's a real alternative to the bloated, buggy, half-finished and expensive second rate Office 2008 with fugly templates that Microsoft has produced for the Mac.

Well done to all involved with Open Office.

If OO hopes to become acceptable to the masses - and the masses could use an alternative to MS Office - then it has to be optimized for speed & size. The functionality is good, but it is sooooo slooooow!

According to their site it's only native if your on an intel chip, not the PPC which is still 2.4.1!

Come on guys

I downloaded it OK yesterday, but I've been using a 3.x developer snapshot for some time - much nicer than 2.4.

<quote>

American != English.

</quote>

Lets see American spoken by ~2 billion people. English (including Scottish) is spoken by - what - three people? I feel sorry for you that "English" is a dying language..... You should try the language widget on Dashboard. I suspect they have an American to English translation you can use.

Oxymoron shurely!

Efros

I'm not exactly an advanced OOo user, but the most noticeable difference to me (other than the shiny new icons) is that file sizes for Office documents seem to have shrunk impressively - .xls and .doc files saved through OOo 3.0 are coming in at a third of the previous file size.

http://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/3.0.0rc4/OOo_3.0.0rc4_MacOSXPowerPC_install.dmg

That's not bloat. Bloat is about how uselessly BIG it is. How slow it is is because Java is on.

Turn Java off and it's a lot quicker.

PS if OOo didn't have all those features, we;d have 100x as many twunts on here saying "it doesn't do anywhere NEAR what Office does, so it's a useless toy for all you linux zealots!"

I'll give it a try. Yeah I know about the feature set thing, I agree.