I ran across a post over at An Outlet which questions why Apple does not support OpenOffice. For me, the more important question is: Why doesn’t Apple support the OpenOffice document formats? I have written about this in a prior post about how the Mac platform currently has little or no support for the OpenDocument format. This format, which is the default format for OpenOffice, is also becoming the format of choice for many Government agencies. Effective January 1st, 2007, The State of Massachusetts will be switching over to open formats, such as OpenDocument, and will phase out proprietary formats such as the current MS Word format. Once this goes into effect, Mac users will be at a disadvantage.

Personally, I think OpenOffice has an awful long way to go before it becomes a viable alternative to MS Office:mac or iWork for that matter. And yes, I know about NeoOffice, but that too still has a long way to go as well. What I’d like to see is Apple support the OpenDocument format in their applications. To date, Apple has had a decent track record supporting open formats. For example:

• iCal uses the iCal format
• iCal also uses WebDAV to publish & subscribe calendars
• Address Book supports the vCard format
• Bonjour (still Rendezvous to me) is an implementation of the Zeroconf spec
• iChat AV supports XMPP (aka Jabber)
• iSync supports SyncML

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Many of Apple’s applications are simply really nice GUIs to an open standard. Support for the OpenDocument format in the next release of iWork would a logical step in following Apple’s pattern of supporting open standards. Whether or not Apple adds OpenDocument support to iWork remains a mystery, at least until MacWorld 2007.

Considering that Apple is a member of the ECMA Technical committee to standarize Microsoft’s Office Open XML format, I fully expect iWork ‘07 to support the new MS Office formats come MacWorld 2007. Windows users will have access to an ODF converter available for Office 2007 users, but it will not be available for Mac OS X. What is interesting about the converter is that at its core, this is an XSLT transformation. So it might be trivial for Apple to add support for both OpenDocument and Microsoft’s Office Open XML formats.

While having OpenOffice getting polished up and properly integrated into Mac OS X would be nice, it’s just not going to happen any time soon. Apple’s iWork is here now and is actually pretty good. If iWork supported both OpenDocument and Microsoft’s Office Open XML formats (and adds a spread sheet application), iWork could become a much more viable application suite. And we’d have a single application suite which could author the two major office file formats.

Why on earth would you set the “Buy It Now” of one this years hottest items to 99¢? This goofy bastard did just that:

The best part is, someone did buy it for 99¢ And then there’s this fella. I have no idea what the relevance of the images are in relation to the PS3, but the fish images are disturbing.

We have had a Mac mini for over a year now and while it served us well, it is rather underpowered. Nah, underpowered is being too nice, the 1.4Ghz G4 model is slow as shit. The main culprit, in my opinion, is the 32MB ATI card that is in the PPC-based Mac mini. The slow performance is especially noticeable when hooked up to a 23-inch Cinema Display. I’d love to upgrade to a new Intel-based Mac mini, but it too is lacking in the video performance category, so I fear that I’d see similar issues. The Mac Pro’s are a bit too out of my price range and due to space issues, I don’t want to have another hulking tower in my home (my PC already fulfills that role). Since I already have a nice display (which is also being shared with my PC via the excellent Gefen 2×1 DVI KVM Switcher), the 24-inch iMac probably won’t be a good solution either.

In fantasy-land, what I’d love to see is something like a Mac mini Pro. A Mac mini Pro would have close to the same tech specs as the iMac (but with at least one FireWire 800 port) and sell for around $999 to $1,400. If the extra video and CPU power can’t be crammed into the current enclosure, the maybe it’s a double-height Mac mini, at which point you could then call it a Mac Cube Pro. With decent video & CPU performance and a minimum of 1GB RAM (expandable to at least 2GB, preferably 3GB+), I’d snatch one up in a second.This would be a great developer/photo-editing workstation for those of us who prefer the more space conscious design while being half the price of a Mac Pro and more flexible than the iMac. That’s what I want for Christmas, or at least for MacWorld 2007.

You could describe F3 as being kind of like Flash meets Java. I ran across a link to Chris Oliver’s Blog, from a post on OS News, where he talks about an upcoming project from Sun called F3. The latest demos Chris has up are quite impressive. There is also mention to a server component too, which makes me think that F3 could be in the same vein as Adobe FLEX or OpenLaszlo. The big difference with F3 is that this is all pure Java, and you’ll still have access to the entire JDK on the client machine.

Chris also has new demo up which demonstrates F3’s SVG support. While still not as robust as Apache’s Batik, F3 is a bit slower rendering the initial SVG. However, pan and zoom is significantly faster with F3 than with Batik. Apparently, F3 will be open sourced soon on Java.net, but no time frame has been given. Right now, I am EXTREMELY curious to see what else comes out of F3. Finally, a compelling reason for an end-user to download the JRE!