IBM has added Mac support to Lotus Symphony, allowing Apple users to access the free application suite from their desktop.

Big Blue said that it had been encouraged by appeals from the Symphony community to add Mac support for Symphony 1.2, which was launched on 4 November.

Mac users will find Symphony tuned to "take advantage" of the Aqua GUI to ensure that their computer's theme of simplicity is maintained in the application suite, IBM added.

Symphony 1.2 will also carry support for the Ubuntu 8.0.4 Linux operating system.

"Support for Mac and Ubuntu are good examples of IBM's long-term commitment to critical standards like the Open Document Format," said Michael Karasick, IBM Lotus China Development Labs director.

Karasick also discussed the Symphony roadmap for 2009, claiming that future generations of Symphony will be developed entirely on the ODF 1.2 and OpenOffice 3.0 software code base in order to bring it in line with OpenOffice technology.

"IBM also sees potential for the global developer community to use Symphony extensively in concert with ODF 1.2 so that documents can be more deeply integrated into business applications and processes," he said.

Symphony 1.2 will contain support for data pilot tables, or pivot tables, which will enable users to sort out large spreadsheets in more meaningful ways and make the spreadsheet data more accessible to business activities, according to IBM.