Okay, so I went through the brutal 160-plus megabyte download of the OpenOffice Mac OS X Final Beta(previous attempts had failed to complete), and installed it. So far, no surprises–it looks very much like versions of StarOffice I once used on Windows and Linux. Very much like them, as in almost disorientingly so–a Windows-like application interface running on my Aqua desktop.

The file compatibility with my MS Office X documents looks good so far, and the response of the app is snappy on my 450 MHz PowerPC Cube despite the multiple I/O layers now running on it. I'm using Apple's latest X11; I'm not sure if that's what's accounting for the over-scroll response to the scroll wheel on my Logitech USB mouse or if that's an OpenOffice thing (if I don't turn it click-by-click, OpenOffice flies from one end of the doc to the other).

Font display is, well, a little jaggedy despite installation of GhostScript and the other add-ons. Quartz doesn't appear to be applied to the X11 interface.

Other than that…well, I'll be doing an AppleWorks / OpenOffice shootout over the next two weeks, and I'll let you know. But there's already one thing that OO has to its advantage–AutoSave. And for the number of times in recent history that I've had a power-disconnecting event here in my office, that's a feature I can use.