PHOTO
The third major release of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite made its appearance on Monday — meeting with such apparent demand that the OpenOffice.org servers promptly crashed. At the time of writing on the following day, the organisation still has only a cut-down homepage, listing mirror sites from which the suite can be downloaded.
One major reason for the significance of OpenOffice 3 is the fact that it can run natively on the Mac — previously, it needed to be run within a windowed X11 session. But the suite has had many other enhancements, one of which is the welcome screen shown in this screenshot.
Talkback
I tried this out at work today on a rather decrepit machine. General appearance looks smarter, and loading times seem to be significantly better.
Good overview, David, it gives a clear look both at the new and improved features, and the programs in general.
The download situation seems to have stabilized now. They have not gone back to their original web page, going to <a href="http://www.openoffice.org">OpenOffice.org</a> still takes you directly to a very simple download page, but at least it works, connects and responds consistently, and downloads at a reasonable speed. I would also point out that near the top of that download page there is a "BitTorrent" download link. Those who have a BitTorrent client (for example, most Linux users) would probably still be better off to download that way than via the http link.
jw 15/10/2008