14 DAY TRIAL // NeoOffice.org has released the third patch for the latest version of NeoOffice, the cool suite of office apps for Mac OS X. NeoOffice 2.2.5 Patch 3 adds Mac OS X Services support, as well as experimental support for Apple's upcoming Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Security fixes have also made their way into this patch.
Mac OS X Services
Starting with NeoOffice 2.2.5 Patch 3, many of the suite's Service menus are enabled whenever you have highlighted data in your document. Basically, by selecting any of these submenus, the highlighted data will be sent to the Mac OS X application that matches the Services menu that you select. If you select the NeoOffice -> Services -> TextEdit -> New Window Containing Selection menu, a new document will be created in the TextEdit application, and the highlighted data in your NeoOffice document will be copied to that new TextEdit document.
You can also select Services -> Spotlight menu, and Mac OS X will do a Spotlight search for the highlighted data in your NeoOffice document. Pretty neat, right? Don't go anywhere – there's also some stuff you have to note before installing this patch. Particularly, NeoOffice doesn't support Mac OS X services that change the highlighted data in your document. Not at this point, anyway (future versions might). Therefore, only services that read your highlighted data are supported, so those like ChineseTextConverter will be disabled. And that's what Services support is all about. Next up...
Snow Leopard
“Recently, Apple has released developer seed of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard,” says the team of developers behind the office suite that doesn't require X11 to run on Mac. “Due to changes in Snow Leopard, starting with NeoOffice 2.2.5 Patch 3, NeoOffice will now run on the latest Snow Leopard developer seed.” The organization adds that it expects users to find bugs in NeoOffice when running on Snow Leopard that do not exist in early versions of Mac OS X. As a result of this, “users should consider our Snow Leopard support to be very experimental” (emphasis added).
Security
Last but not least, two security flaws were found and fixed, specifically targeting manipulated WMF and EMF files that could lead to heap overflows and arbitrary code execution.