Come September next year, the Apple scene may be seeing the appearance of an OpenOffice office suite that will work natively with Mac OS X. That is, this new build won't require you to install the Unix windowing software called X11, which has been the source of headaches among Mac users.

This information we're picking is based on a presentation by Eric Bachard, who also noted that September 2008 may see OpenOffice v3.0 getting released. As it stands, OpenOffice most recent build is version 2.3.0. Eric is among the the lead developers of the Mac "Aqua" (the name for the MAC OS X GUI) port of OpenOffice.

At the moment, the most hassle-free OpenOffice port we've picked up is Planamesa Software's NeoOffice. This particular build reportedly works more seamlessly with Aqua since it doesn't require the X11 environment , although at the cost of higher memory usage. The latest build for NeoOffice at this point is v2.2.1, and is based on OpenOffice v2.2.1.