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Wed, 08 Sep 2004

OpenOSX Office 1.5 Available Now

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. --Sep. 7th, 2004-- OpenOSX today announced the immediate availability of Office 1.5 for Mac OS X "Panther" that is a easy-to-use solution for configuring, installing and utilizing the proven open source "GNOME Office" software, offering users a wealth of productivity software. This newest edition delivers enhanced integration with Mac OS X, completely new and updated software, improved installation along with additional features and enhancements.

GNOME is a popular free desktop environment included with many distributions of Linux including RedHat. Mac OS X includes its own desktop environment and does not include the exhaustive list of support libraries required to run "GNOME Office". OpenOSX has built these dependent libraries and customized them for Mac OS X installed by a single-click installation and backed with support.

In the process OpenOSX married the GNOME environment with Mac OS X offering native functionality including preferred web browser support, Print Center support, linkable files and for the first time, an all new "OpenOSX Office" cocoa application that enables system-wide recognition of supported file types including Microsoft® Word and Excel documents. This allows any of the many supported file types to be opened in the appropriate software by double-clicking or dragging files to its icon.

Featured in the OpenOSX package is "Gnumeric" which reads and writes Microsoft® Excel files complete with 100% of functions of Microsoft® Excel, "AbiWord" which is an award winning open source alternative to Microsoft® Word which reads and writes Microsoft Word documents, SodiPodi which is a powerful Vector image manipulation program and Diagram, complete flexible flowchart software.

"To my knowledge there simply is not a faster or easier way possible to get similar functionality installed in Mac OS X." said Jeshua Lacock, the owner of OpenOSX. "In the same time it takes to copy 480 megabytes to your hard disk, you can be running this awesome suite, complete with our exclusive 'OpenOSX Office' application."

The OpenOSX Office product is available immediately for us$40 on CD-ROM, with download-only delivery available for us$30, upgrades from previous versions of the product are us$20 on CD-ROM and us$15 for download. OpenOSX also has complementary, specially priced, O'Reilly book bundles and 6-month hassle-free CD-subscriptions available. Limited installation support and documentation is included. Visit the OpenOSX web site for more details at: http://OpenOSX.com/office/

OpenOSX is a company dedicated to serving, and expanding, the Macintosh community. Founded on the premise that many computer users are intimidated by the UNIX command-line, OpenOSX committed itself to one mission- bringing popular Unix software to both the "Unix-challenged" and the seasoned, Mac inclined system administrator in a friendly, Mac environment.

Note: the same software is available free via Fink.

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CPLAT II: Cross-platform Framework

ksoft (www.ksoft.net) is pleased to announce the release of CPLAT II which is a complete redesign and modernization of the original CPLAT cross-platform framework.

CPLAT II is a modern C++ framework using policies and STL for development of C++ application that will run under MacOS and / or Windows. Linux support is partial at this time.


CPLAT II does not emulate a platforms controls, but instead uses the native OS controls on the underlying platform. This means that the following platform features are incorporated in CPLAT II.

MacOS
- HIViews
- Quartz
- Carbon Events
- Sheets
- Composited Windows
- Metal Windows
- Drawers
- Navigation Services
- Nibs
- Bundles
- QuickTime
- OpenGL
- Mach or CFM

Windows
- Native controls
- GDI+
- QuickTime with QuickTime installed
- OpenGL


CPLAT can be built using the following supported compilers / build systems.

MacOS
- Codewarrior Pro 8.x
- Codewarrior Pro 9.x
- Apples ProjectBuilder
- Apples XCode

Windows
- Codewarrior Pro 8.x
- Codewarrior Pro 9.x
- VisualC++ 6
- VisualNet 7

CPLAT II is available for $50 and includes complete source code, projects and documentation for all demos, tools and framework. Updates are posted several times a year. CPLAT II can be used in commercial, shareware or freeware applications without any further licensing costs.

Full details and trial projects can be found at: http://www.ksoft.net

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Biferno 1.1

Tabasoft (http://www.tabasoft.it) announces the availability for free download of Biferno version 1.1.



Thank to the new Biferno xmlDoc class it is now possible to open, create, modify and validate XML documents. Besides, it is also possible to navigate their hierarchical structure and to get/set content and attribute values combining xmlDoc with the other Biferno new XML class: xmlNode.



Besides, the new Biferno extension jclass allows Biferno code to invoke Java classes directly. Developers can now take advantage of all Java 2 Platform classes in their Biferno web sites. Besides, if they have developed their own java classes, they can reuse that code in bfr scripts with no modifications.



Many bugs have been fixed and further enhancements include the unix.bash method, MD5 string encryption and an improved string.Decode method.



Check the complete release notes for a detailed description of the (numerous) changes and fixes of this version.



Biferno is a new object-oriented, HTML embedded, scripting language for web development. The high-level built-in classes, with their methods and properties, make the code very clean and easy to mantain.



Biferno is an open-source, cross-platform project for Linux, Windows, MacOSX and Classic and with the effort of other programmers can be recompiled on other operating systems. This makes very easy to move a site created with Biferno from one system to another.



Biferno has a plug-in architecture that makes the language completely extensible, allowing other developer to easily add functionality through internal and external classes.



For more information please visit http://www.tabasoft.it/biferno where you can download the software, including guides, manuals and an on-line reference.


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