14 DAY TRIAL // NeoOffice.org has released new updates to its full-featured suite of office applications for Mac OS X, NeoOffice. The patches (5 for Neo 3.0 and 13 for version 2.2.5) fix an issue that was just found after Patch 4 for NeoOffice 3.0 was released.
“Although we released the last NeoOffice patches only a week ago, bug 3494 was found by our volunteer testers shortly after the patches. This bug, which is a side effect of the fix for bug 3478, causes odd glyph kerning behavior with some fonts,” the pluby, also known as The Architect on the NeoOffice forums, reveals. “While we wish that we could have found this bug before the last patches were released, we want to reiterate one very important risk that users of free software assume: users are the testers.”
“While NeoOffice is free, there is no big corporation funding it and it is funded entirely by the time and money donated by its users,” pluby adds. “What this means is that hundreds of thousands of NeoOffice users are relying on a single full time programmer and a handful of part time volunteers to do all bug fixing and testing. While our small team of volunteers do an amazing job of answering support questions and testing, such a tiny group is not going to be able to thoroughly test all features in a very large, complex application like NeoOffice after each bug fix. Since our existing donation levels preclude hiring any staff, we have attempted to mitigate our limited testing by releasing patches frequently so that if any big issues occur in one patch, a fix is available very soon after the issue is reported by users,” pluby concludes, offering download links to the two new releases, as well as the changelog for each in part.
NeoOffice 3.0 Patch 5 fixes two bugs: cursor jumps when Delete key is pressed; command-arrow key does not move to end or beginning of line. Bugs fixed in both patches include: base crashes when using Mac OS X address book; problem with user-defined date modification in Calc; some information in a .doc file not displayed.