14 DAY TRIAL // Beating more popular (and more powerful) productivity suites to the race to support OS X Lion’s native Versioning, and Full-Screen Mode, NeoOffice 3.2.1 is now available for download with full support for some specific OS X 10.7 functionality.
“We are pleased to announce the release of NeoOffice 3.2.1 Beta,” reads the announcement posted on the Trinity forums.
Available only to the most generous of donors, the latest version of the Mac-native office suite comes with support for three key features added by Apple in OS X Lion.
“NeoOffice 3.2.1 Beta can be downloaded by all NeoOffice donors who have donated US$10 (or €7 or £6 or CA$10 or AU$10 or ¥834) or more within the last year from the NeoOffice download page,” according to Patrick, Fran, Ed, and Tim - The NeoOffice Team.
“NeoOffice 3.2.1 Beta adds new features for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion users such as: Versions; Full-Screen mode; Resume,” the post continues.
For comparison, Microsoft says it will be 'months' before Office for Mac 2011 gets support for these features. OpenOffice users currently don't benefit from these enhancements either.
Starting with NeoOffice 3.2.1 Beta, saving a file will automatically keep a copy of your document before any changes are saved.
You will be able to restore any of the previous versions of your document in Apple's document version browser, by selecting NeoOffice's new Browse All Versions menu.
Thanks to Full-Screen support, users can now work on a document distraction-free, while Resume will help Mac users “avoid the tedious process of reopening their documents after launching an application,” as the folks at NeoOffice themselves explain.
Those who want to download a free build of NeoOffice may do so without donating, but they’ll be stuck at version 3.1.2 which currently doesn’t support these Lion-specific features.
The suite, however, does get along with Apple’s big cat. In other words, short of these three Lion enhancements, free users are pretty much in the same boat as the generous donors.