14 DAY TRIAL // NeoOffice.org has launched yet another version of their powerful productivity suite, further strengthening its compatibility with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, the next major Mac OS release from Apple.
Update: as one of our readers points out in the comments, Lion is known to have diminished support for a few technologies, which includes the likes of Java (out of the box). We have updated the article to clarify that.
The team of developers at NeoOffice say they’ve been keeping themselves busy testing NeoOffice on the latest developer previews of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, following the release of the last NeoOffice 3.2 patch last month.
In the process of testing their suite against Lion, they discovered a bug in the way Lion handles Java. This, most likely has to do with the fact that Apple is no longer providing full support for Sun-developed coding language.
“As a side effect of that testing, we recently found a way to fix a window resizing bug in Apple's Java that has annoyed NeoOffice users for many years and we have included the fix for this bug in NeoOffice 3.2 Patch 3,” reads a post by pluby of the NeoOffice.org team.
“This bug in Apple's Java causes a window's entire background to be painted white when you resize a window,” he reveals, though it shouldn't be noted as Apple's Java per se.
“With our fix, Java no longer paints the entire window white so that the content in your document now remains visible when you resize any NeoOffice windows.”
A couple of other bugs have also been fixed in NeoOffice 3.2 Patch 3, such as index page style creating a separate print job, and the Quick Look plugin ignoring template files.
“If you have any support questions, a list of suggested steps for finding an answer for a problem as fast as possible is available on the NeoOffice Support page,” adds the author of the post.
“Since over half of our donations come from a very small percentage of our users, we can only provide support to our most generous donors in our NeoOffice forums.”
NeoOffice is one of the first, if not the first open source suite of productivity / office tools to support OS X Lion out of the box.
It boasts word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing programs, it is based on the OpenOffice suite, and incorporates dozens of native Mac features.
Users can import, edit, and exchange files with other popular office programs such as Microsoft Office.