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Review: NeoOffice 3.0

Julian Prokaza — 2009-05-08T17:51:00.000Z

Julian Prokaza, vnunet.com, Friday 8 May 2009 at 17:51:00

An OpenOffice suite designed specifically for the Mac

Although essentially a reworked version of Sun OpenOffice, NeoOffice has long been a more popular choice for Mac users looking for a powerful open-source productivity suite. The main reason was speed; until recently, OpenOffice relied on clunky Unix emulation for its Mac-compatible version, while NeoOffice was rewritten by third-party developers to make it Mac OS-native from day one.

With the release of OpenOffice.org 3.1, as Sun now calls it, the gap between the two suites has narrowed. OpenOffice is now Mac OS-native too, but the NeoOffice team still claims an advantage. Its code has been Mac OS-native from the get-go, while this is Sun's first foray with OpenOffice.org, despite the higher version number.

So, the claim is that NeoOffice's more mature code is likely to make it a much more stable application, but such claims are difficult to assess. In fact, in day to day use, NeoOffice still crashes with annoying regularity, but its document recovery procedure seems pretty bullet-proof.

Superficially, the two suites are very similar, but NeoOffice does claim a few unique features. Perhaps the most important is support for Mac OS Services, which means words can be looked up in Apple Dictionary from within a document, for example. NeoOffice windows also behave in a more Mac-like fashion, and any open palettes are hidden when the application is out of focus. OpenOffice.org 3.0 leaves such palettes in place, which can be distracting on a busy desktop.

Owners of older Macs will also be gratified with a PowerPC version of NeoOffice, since Sun dropped support for this older Mac processor with the launch of OpenOffice.org 3.0. NeoOffice does, however, lack OpenOffice.org's support for Universal Access, which means users who make use of the Mac's enhanced accessibility features, for example inverse screen colours, visual alerts, sticky keys, and so on, will have to stick with Sun.

As with OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice's open-source origins are somewhat betrayed by a general lack of overall polish and user-friendliness - two areas where most Mac applications excel. This is perhaps most evident with document formatting. Both Microsoft Office 2007 for Mac and Apple iWork '09 offer a wide range of extremely professional templates and slick built-in styles, but NeoOffice's offerings are rudimentary at best.

One upside, however, is that, while NeoOffice's cluttered user interface may be an affront to die-hard Mac fans used to more streamlined applications, it so closely resembles Microsoft Office that Windows users will get to grips with the suite in seconds, which is perhaps more than can be said for Apple iWork '09.

Cross-suite document compatibility is another of NeoOffice's strong points. It can't open iWork documents - but then nothing can other than iWork - but it can cope with Microsoft Office, Microsoft Works and even WordPerfect files. It can also be configured to save documents in Office file formats by default, including the new Office XML format, making for foolproof Mac/Windows compatibility.

Well, perhaps not completely fool-proof. Office document compatibility is good, but not perfect, although the only problems tend to be with document formatting, and then only occasionally.

Like any open-source application, the lack of technical support is an obvious disincentive for widespread adoption of NeoOffice within a business environment. There is a good user support forum, but this is no replacement for an expert at the other end of a telephone. These open-source shortcomings are mostly mitigated by NeoOffice's open-source price, though, and if nothing else the suite makes an ideal partner to Apple iWork '09 for anyone who needs capable Microsoft Office compatibility with a minimum outlay.

Review: Apple iWork '09

Julian Prokaza — 2009-04-24T13:41:00.000Z

Julian Prokaza, vnunet.com, Friday 24 April 2009 at 13:41:00

The latest version of Apple’s productivity suite for Macs features some overdue additions

iWork '09 is the latest version of Apple's productivity suite for Macs. This fourth major iteration adds several long-awaited features to the trinity of applications — the Pages word processor, Numbers spreadsheet and Keynote presentations tools — including some that have long since been standard issue for the competition.

Perhaps the most notable new feature is mail merge. Until now, Pages could only pull contact information from Apple Address Book, which did little to lure business users to the suite. Pages '09, however, can now use a Numbers spreadsheet as a database for mail-merged documents, opening up a far richer world of personalised template documents.

Pages still doesn't offer anything other than a full WYSIWYG view for people who want to work with words rather than entire pages, but the new Full-Screen View offers a partial solution. This displays one or two full-screen pages side by side on a black background to hide potential distractions — although this also hides any other documents you may be referring to.

Also new is an Outline mode that makes it easy to organise a document's content hierarchically. Although other word processor users may scoff at the late addition of such a standard tool, it does make Pages a viable alternative to applications like OmniOutliner for many users.

Apple cites over 250 formulae and a handful of new 2D chart types as notable additions to Pages '09, but of more interest is its new Table Categories feature. Pages still lacks pivot table support, but Table Categories perform a similar function by grouping rows or columns of data into content categories. Summary calculations such as subtotal and average can then be inserted for each category, and categories can be quickly reorganised, making Table Categories an effective way to work with large data sets.

The feature works more like Excel's Group and Outline tool than true pivot tables, but it's considerably more intuitive.

Also new is the ability to embed linked Numbers charts into Pages and Keynote documents, although each must be updated manually if the source data changes. Keynote itself gets little more than a polish in this edition and while new themes and sophisticated slide transitions are welcome, they're hardly killer features. Sound handling hasn't been improved though, and there's still no straightforward way to synchronise multiple sound clips to different slides in a presentation.

Across-the-board improvements include a new document format that consist of a single file rather than a combined package, and better Microsoft Office file handling. Word, Excel and PowerPoint now appear as file types in the appropriate application's Save As dialog boxes rather than as an Export option, but Office-format files can only be saved as a copy alongside the original iWork file.

Actual Microsoft Office document compatibility is a bit hit and miss. Pages handled a Word document containing a table with aplomb, unlike rival open-source productivity suite NeoOffice, but Numbers badly fumbled a large, complex Excel sheet. This was the result of its inability to handle Excel's conditional formatting, despite offering its own take on the same tool, and grouped data – Pages just deletes grouped data that has been condensed.

Obviously, iWork '09 also strips out features that aren't supported in Office when saving documents in that file format, which means that cross-editing in iWork and Office is best done using simple documents that don't exploit their respective parent applications' potential.

Productivity suite power users won't find much to tempt them in iWork '09 and Apple does appear to be playing catch-up with the competition when it comes to certain basic features, but this isn't a set of applications designed to compete with the likes of Microsoft Office. By focusing on ease of use rather than an endless list of little-used features, iWorks '09 makes it easy to create slick, sophisticated documents with the minimum of effort – although the unbelievable lack of an auto-save option might mean some documents end up being created more than once.

Review: VMware ThinApp 4.0

Dave Bailey — 2008-10-09T11:45:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, vnunet.com, Thursday 9 October 2008 at 11:45:00

VMware's ThinApp acquisition saves time for IT managers rolling out virtualised apps

VMware acquired application virtualisation vendor ThinApp in January and ThinApp 4.0, launched in June, is the first fruit of that takeover.

Securing Windows applications for mobile professionals, as well as allowing network access by onsite contractors, partners and just ordinary guests, is an age-old problem that application virtualisation using ThinApp neatly solves.

Application virtualisation decouples the application from the operating system (OS), unlike hardware virtualisation which merely decouples the OS from the hardware. This means that applications can run on exotic hardware providing the OS has the requisite drivers.

The upshot is that, in theory, IT managers can rollout conflict-free applications packaged into what VMware says is a "virtual bubble" containing the application as a standalone executable or Microsoft Installer file extension.

User data is stored in an application embedded sandbox, or one which resides on a network drive, and is renewed after each application deployment.

To review ThinApp we downloaded a trial evaluation of the ThinApp Virtualisation Suite, which has the latest release copy of VMware Workstation 6.0.4 included, along with ThinApp 4.0.

VMware Workstation is included in the suite because it allows the required application to be virtualised on a clean system. The snapshot function of Workstation can keep it clean through its ability to roll back to a desired state, which would be fully patched but with no third-party applications installed.

The alternative way was to create a clean, fully patched operating system, and back up the system image using either Windows Vista's built-in tools or something like Symantec's Ghost imaging utility on Windows 2000 and XP Professional systems, to create an OS image on a separate disk partition or external hard drive.

ThinApp can then be run on a shared drive and, after the virtualised application has been created, the OS can be re-imaged back to a clean state.

New features like Application Link and Application Sync solve the problem IT managers had in building virtual applications that would automatically update when application security updates came out. Before, each security update or service pack release necessitated a rebuilding of the application.

Installing both ThinApp 4.0 and VMware Workstation was quick and easy, and we created fully patched virtual machines for Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional and Windows Vista Ultimate.

To create a packaged application deployable to a USB stick, ThinApp was first used to scan the clean operating system. We then installed Microsoft Office Word Professional 2003, and rescanned the system with ThinApp.

The second ThinApp scan captures file system and registry changes, which define an application installation. We then built the application and rolled out to both a USB stick and a network drive on a separate system.

We could install the virtualised application using the USB stick or by executing the MSI on the network drive with no problems.

After this we set up ThinApp to work with Active Directory. We installed VMware Workstation on a desktop connected to our vnunet.com domain, and we could build applications configured to be run only by certain Active Directory groups and store them on our file server.

Because ThinApp decouples the application from the OS we could run applications on Windows 2000 Professional systems and log-on to our Active Directory domain and run the same applications on Windows XP Professional or Windows Vista systems.

The ThinApp manual says that "this functionality allows most applications to instantly migrate to newer or older operating systems". IT managers will still have to check whether this is the case, though, and certify that the application runs properly on specific operating systems.

One of the new features of ThinApp 4.0 is Application Sync, which we could use to build a Microsoft Office 2003 Word application. This allowed us to pick up later Office service packs off the web without having to rebuild the entire application.

The other key new feature is Application Link, which gives IT managers the ability to build applications that have interdependencies on other applications.

Integrating ThinApp with Active Directory, and Application Link and Sync, gives IT managers better control through group policy. However, building applications using the system is not trivial, a fact emphasised by the two-day and five-day workshops VMware has set up to advise enterprises using application virtualisation.

VMware has also released the ThinApp Application Packaging Framework, a best practice guide for application conversion.