Tomorrow evening (Tuesday) I'll be talking about Effective XML at the XML Developers Network of the Capital District in Albany New York. The meeting runs from 6:00 to 8:00 P.M. Everyone's invited.
Planamesa Software has posted the second alpha of NeoOffice/J 1.1, a MacOS X variant of OpenOffice that replaces X-Windows with Java Swing. This release "supports the features in OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 including faster startup, right-to-left and vertical text editing, and the ability to save documents directly to PDF." I wrote the original version of the Effective XML presentation in OpenOffice on Linux, which proved not up to the task so I eventually moved it to PowerPoint. I'll check this out and see if maybe I can use NeoOffice/J for tomorrow night's presentation, but no promises.
OK: verdict's in. That was quick. This product is definitely not ready for prime time, at least in the presentation component. As soon as I opened my PowerPoint slides, NeoOffice/J seemed to get stuck in an infinite flashing loop of draw and redraw. At least it let me quit, but I couldn't do anything else. I will be using PowerPoint tomorrow night.