OpenOffice 3 for Mac just went to beta
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
May 29, 2008 at 1:03pm
Sun Microsystems and the OpenOffice.org community have announced the availability of more than 100 extensions in the OpenOffice.org Extension Repository with the most popular ones achieving downloads of more than 200,000.
Extensions are additional components downloaded on top of an existing OpenOffice.org installation to add extra features, templates, languages and dictionaries to the software. Created through worldwide community collaboration, the OpenOffice.org Extension Repository includes template packs, a report designer, tools for professional writers, translation, presentation compression functionality and more.
Two new OpenOffice.org 3.0 features, highlighted on the product roadmap and expected to be released as extensions within weeks are the Sun Presenter Console and the Sun PDF Import Extension. The Sun Presenter Console extension is available now to preview from the extension repository. It allows users to view their speaker notes, the next slide and the time on their laptop screens while presenting via a connected projector. The Sun PDF Import Extension allows users to edit PDF files.
OpenOffice.org extensions can be created by developers as multi-platform components using technologies, such as, Java and NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE). OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta has added platform support for Mac OS X in addition to Windows, Linux and the Solaris OS.
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 with this upcoming release, Mac OS X (Intel-based Macs only), according to Peter Korn, accessibility architect at Sun Microsystems and co-chair of the OASIS OpenDocument accessibility subcommittee.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 will be the first version to run on Mac OS X that will have the look and feel of an Aqua application while supporting the Mac OS X accessibility application programming interfaces (APIs), and integrating well with the built-in Macintosh VoiceOver screen reader, Korn says.
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
