03.23.08

New in NeoOffice 2.2.3

Posted in Open Source, Software at 8:54 pm by Smokey

Last Monday NeoOffice.org (aka Patrick and Ed, with bits of help from the rest of us) released the latest NeoOffice milestone, 2.2.3. Although this version is still using the OpenOffice.org 2.2 codebase, 2.2.3 is packed full of new Mac goodies you won’t find in other open source office suites for the Mac.

We’ve long been “spoiled” on the Mac by having things “just work”—often through the hard work of Apple engineers designing APIs and “for free” features of standard objects, but also through the hard work of application developers themselves. When porting an application from another platform, many of these things that “just work” in born-on-the-Mac apps don’t work. Because of our high standards as Mac users, it’s hard to build a good Mac app, and even harder to build a good Mac version of a cross-platform app.

NeoOffice began its life as an application that was hard to call even Mac-like (in comparison to OpenOffice.org, which only ran under X11, it was a gem; in comparison to Microsoft Office X, not so much), and development tackled the important tasks of stability and functionality (printing! native fonts!) first, gradually adding more characteristics of a standard Mac application and culminating in the “fully Aqua” NeoOffice 2.1 release last April. Of course there’s always more to do—another non-Mac-like bit to polish, another new Apple feature to include—and over the last year more standard Mac features were added (though at a slower pace, as feature size increased).

With NeoOffice 2.2.3, Ed added support for Mac OS X 10.5’s grammar checker to the existing support for the Mac OS X spell-checker (the support is fully pluggable, if anyone knows of any other grammar-checking backends). Patrick finally got the pop-up file hierarchy working in document titlebars (one of those “you don’t miss it until you go to use it and it’s not there” features). The lack of application menus when no documents were open became a thing of the past; your File menu and recent documents are always a click away now. The team ripped out OpenOffice.org’s arcane and crippled scanner support and replaced it with native Image Capture support for importing images from scanners and cameras. Our dedicated team of icon artists replaced a few dozen more ugly platform-generic icons with new Akua versions, bringing NeoOffice that much closer to the 7K+ figure required for a complete icon set.

By far the largest feature in 2.2.3, however, is support for embedded video playback. QuickTime is one of those ubiquitous Mac technologies that everyone expects to “just work” in every program; it’s in your web browser, your jukebox, and your presentations (don’t ask me why; maybe you want to spin around a model of a molecule or fly through a room in your building design?). Now it’s in your open source office suite, too, playing any non-protected QuickTime-supported format on Mac OS X 10.4 and above (and spinning your molecule models until your battery runs out), just like all of those other Mac apps you love.

What’s to come in the future? The OpenOffice.org 3.0 codebase, that much is for sure. Beyond that, we’ll have to see what other tricks Patrick and Ed have up their sleeves (Ed likes to tease everyone with screenshots of his machinations), but the OOo 3.0 upgrade will be huge in itself, thanks to the work of Sun’s OpenOffice.org and Novell’s ooo-build engineers.

One final note: if you’re a NeoOffice user who will be near Milan in late May, FreeSMUG.org will be hosting a NeoOffice event with Patrick and Ed. See the NeoWiki for more information.

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