I can tell you right away, a native-looking Gnumeric (via a freely available GTK+ theme that looks like Aqua) would make waves in the Mac OS X userbase even if it had to run under X11 (which now gets installed by default on Tiger btw). So, why not do the same for Gnumeric then? Gnumeric is a great application, one of the best GTK+ apps ever written. While most OSX users don’t like X11, they dig gimp.app just fine, because of the convenience involved and its appearance as a native app. These guys have done a great job making Gimp “look” like a native Mac OS X application: the theme used, the icon and launcher used, the automation of it. What sprang into my mind immediately was the very convenient package of the Free GPL gimp.app. BC is too basic and OOo/NeoOffice are big, slow and ugly (I absolutely refuse to install them again). I am writing this article after my personal adventures trying to find a functional, yet free, spreadsheet for OSX. Enter the world of GNU which can not only provide “free” applications as in beer, but most importantly, “Free”, as in Freedom. In the recent days more freeware applications have emerged, but the majority are small utilities and not full scale applications.

The Mac platform was always considered a premium platform, hence much of its software is shareware or commercial.

Apache openoffice base tutorial