Some while ago, I wrote about NeoOffice, an OpenOffice.org port for the Mac. It provided what OpenOffice.org could not - a native interface. OpenOffice.org 2.x still used the X11 interface so integration was clunky at best.

Unfortunately for NeoOffice, that's just about to change. I've been playing with a release candidate of OpenOffice.org 3.0 for the Mac, and it's great. Fully native interface, and everything seems to work. No niggly little keybinding bugs. No scrolling issues. No strangely drawn dialog boxes. It "Just Works".

I'm not really sure where that leaves NeoOffice now, though. While I've appreciated their work, I can't really see any reason to still use it now that the "real" OOo works natively. And seeing as porting OOo 2.x to a native Aqua interface was the prime motivation of NeoOffice, I can't really see what they can bring to the table.

At the moment, the NeoOffice site claims that presentations run faster than OOo 3.0. I'm sure there are other Mac integration efforts they can use to make sure they stay a little way ahead of the OpenOffice.org curve, but for the basic functionality they seem to have been left somewhat high and dry by this latest OOo release.

Time will tell. In the meantime, you have to donate cash to get access to NeoOffice 3, while you can get the OOo release candidate for free. They don't expect to have a free release 'til January 2009. I think I'll just stick with OOo. Sorry, NeoOffice guys.

My Macbook PSU finally gave up after 19 months of undeniably hard wear. The cable frayed enough near the little magsafe connector to render it completely useless. Ah well, c'est la vie. I've just been to the Apple store and picked up another one. £54.12 if you please.

This got me thinking. One of the criticisms levelled at Apple is that you can "only" use Apple parts in Macs, and these parts are expensive. This is absolutely true, aside from the falsehoods (e.g. 3rd party RAM and hard disks). But the fact is, you actually can buy Apple parts for it. I just popped into my local shopping centre and walked out with a new laptop PSU as part of my normal shopping. I can't think of any other laptop brand that has the same level of availability of parts or accessories.

Of course, if your Toshiba laptop PSU explodes for some reason (manufacturing faults occur in all brands, Apple included. No fanboys here, ta) you could buy some 3rd party "universal" adapter from your local electronics retailer. These will probably work as well as 3rd party mobile phone chargers; adequately for a while but with half the working lifespan of an original. Or, of course, you could call the Toshiba spares line and buy an original, but that won't be cheap and you'll have to wait for it.

I don't have any particular deep or philosophical point to make here. It's just that somebody actually said, when my laptop PSU died, that I'd "be stuck buying an expensive Apple replacement." And yes, I did. But it has a full year's warranty and it took 30 minutes to drive over and pick one up. I like that.

Thanks to a friend who is far more enthusiastic than me, I've had the pleasure of following MacHeist this year. It's a two stage event to promote the indepedent software development scene on the Mac.

I haven't previously bothered with it because it conflicts with my Free software ideals. However, I'm a filthy hypocrite and I have been known to pay for the odd bit of software in the past.

The first bit of MacHeist is a sort of game. You do 'missions' and get rewarded with free licenses to Mac shareware apps. Cool. There's some good stuff available, too. WireTap Pro, for a start. Very good app, and even better for nothing!

The second bit is a sort of 'charity bake sale'. There are 11 apps available in a bundle for $49.99, or $39.99 for register MacHeist members (hooray!). So that's £20 for 11 pieces of software. Not all useful, I'll admit, but enough good to offset the not-so-great.

Unfortunately only the first eight items are available at the start of the sale. These were, in no particular order:

• 1password - Web browser keychain manager
• CoverSutra - iTunes remote control with sexy graphics
• Cha-Ching - basic finance management for the everyman
• iStopMotions - stop motion animation program for use with iSight
• Awaken - an alarm clock. Not much good for us portable owners
• SpeedDownload - an all-in-one upload/download/connection manager thingy
• AppZapper - essentially a clever uninstaller
• TaskPaper - a todo list / outline management tool

An interesting mix. 1password, Cha-Ching, Speed Download and AppZapper made the £20 outlay worth it for me. The others are just gravy. However, there are more! As different targets are reached (e.g. a certain number of sales made, a certain charity donation amount reached) more apps are unlocked that are then made available to everybody who buys the bundle.

There are three targets that need to be reached. I'm not entirely sure what they are, but two of them have been reached already. The apps that are made available are:

1. CSSEdit - a CSS editor with the unique feature of a real time preview
2. Snapz Pro X - a screenshot and screencast maker that is quick enough to even capture composited animations
3. Pixelmator - a graphics manipulation program along the lines of Photoshop Elements

At last count we were almost all the way to getting Pixelmator thrown in. That'll be a nice addition to my not-very-expensive bundle. If you want a piece of action, click this link here. Why? Oh no reason ... well, except I get freebies for referring people!

As my previous posting indicated, I now have a new aluminium Mac keyboard on for use on my Windows development machine. I also provided a link to the keyboard drivers and Boot Camp control panel. However, there was a problem!

For some ridiculous reason, the £ symbol is used on the 3 key, and you have to press ctrl-shift-3 to get a # symbol. For a programmer, this is not a good situation. The # is needed far more than £ ever is. What to do? Well, I figured I could do the same as I do on my MacBook; use the US keyboard map. The benefit is that it's exactly the same as the UK keyboard map, with the # and £ switched around. Marvellous. Could I find one? Could I hell.

Here's where the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Tool came in handy. I've created a keyboard layout based on the United Kingdom (Apple) layout installed by Boot Camp with one very small change.

• The # (hash) is now accessed by shift-3
• The £ (pound sign) is now accessed by ctrl-alt-3

Brilliant. You can download the United States (Apple) for English (United Kingdom) layout by just clicking the link. Have fun!

Yes, another new keyboard. This time it's an Apple Aluminium keyboard from the new iMac line. The basic reasoning behind this purchase is because I have wrecked the knuckles of my right hand in a fight with a door and a pane of glass, so I can't bend my middle or index fingers. This means that traditional keyboards cause a problem due to their long key travel, but notebook keyboards are fine. The new Apple aluminium keyboard is almost identical to the 'chiclet' design of the MacBook, so is very much like a notebook keyboard writ large.

Like many people, I like to dial up using my mobile phone when I'm out and about. I only have GPRS, after my 3G phone got on my nerves with its rubbish battery when using CDMA and silly camera lens cover. That doesn't mean it has its uses though. For SSH and image-free browsing it's great, and as other posts suggest it works nicely with the Nokia 770.

Unfortunately OS X is a little less friendly than the Nokia device when it comes to talking to your favourite bluetooth modem. It insists that you manually specify the correct Modem Script to get it all going, and if you can't see yours then you're pretty much stuffed. Well, that's what I thought.

It turns out that a chap called Ross Barkman has made a massive collection of dialup modem scripts for all kinds of phones and other devices, including some generic ones that I eventually used to get the X820 working. The collection is all here, with instructions on what to do.

Oh, and a word from the not-so-wise; when it asks you the phone number for GPRS, make sure you enter the GRPS APN into the field, and not the strange *9***1# nonsense that other devices ask you for. It's just something to be wary of, although Ross's scripts to include a file telling you that.

So Safari is available on Windows. Whoop-de-doo, eh? While I'm not exactly sold on the "Safari is the best browser out there on any platform" sales schtick I can understand why Apple have chosen to do it. The most obvious reason is because, as has been confirmed, it allows Windows based web developers to test in Safari without having to have a special Macintosh somewhere in the office.

This situation has been around for a while; very few web developers would develop natively on a Mac because, quite simply, the most prominent browser by a good 60% of the browser market doesn't run on it. However, thanks to the rather half-baked nonsense that was Internet Explorer for Mac, and the even more platform specific issue of Safari, the Mac has been something of a second class citizen in the web design world. Indeed, there is a very good reason most Mac users I know use Camino or Firefox; the Gecko engine. Stuff developed on Linux or Windows will work just the same, and that's got to be good.

I was recently pondering the sorry state of free/open source word processors on OS X. There is OpenOffice.org, which sadly requires X11 and so has an inconsistent interface. There is Abiword, which looks like somebody threw up on the toolbar on an Intel Mac, and the Abisource guys are just moaning that nobody will finance them a Macbook to fix it. There is a new one called Bean that looks largely useless. Pretty, but useless.

Finally, and this appears to be our last, best hope, is NeoOffice. NeoOffice is a project to migrate OpenOffice.org to a native OS X user interface, thus shunning the evil that is X11 on OS X. I tried it before, up until 2.0beta3, and kept trying to make good use of it but the bugs and performance problems were just too numerous and irritating.

So, for a while I just went on my anachronistic way and thought to myself "I don't need a native interface if it's all buggy, X11 is fine for me" How foolish I was. After a period of development, and a stable 2.1 release, it seems that NeoOffice has finally come of age.

On Thursday 26th October, a new SMC firmware update appeared in the Software Updates window of my week 36 Macbook. Version 1.0 of the SMC firmware fixed the "moo" and overheating issues, and version 1.1 ostensibly fixes the random shutdowns that have been plaguing some of us for months.

So I bought a shiny, new, top-of-the-range iMac off Ebay for the princely sum of £6.99. Well, I say new and top-of-the-range; it's a 233MHz G3, so I could be stretching the definition a little. It has 128MB of RAM, and a mighty 6.4GB hard disk. I came with OS 9, but that's long gone. The question is, what am I going to do with it?