NeoOffice 2.2.4 Patch 4 New Features

From NeoWiki

After we added slideshow remote control support in NeoOffice 2.2.4 Patch 3, we have continued work on additional performance improvements and new features for our users.

As a result of our recent work, NeoOffice 2.2.4 Patch 4 has the following new performance improvements over previous versions of NeoOffice:

• Slideshow presentations run up to 33% faster
• PowerPoint and Impress files open up to 10% faster

With these performance improvements, NeoOffice slideshow presentations run significantly faster than OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta 2.

Special thanks go to all who have donated to the NeoOffice.org project since our we released NeoOffice 2.2.4. Without everyone's donations, not only would we have been unable to implement the these new features, we would not have been able to provide rapid investigation and fixing of significant bugs found by users.

More details

While slideshow speed has been reasonable on new machines with lots of memory, slideshow speed has been very slow for older machines or machines with limited memory. Since it has been a year since we have added any slideshow performance improvements, we spent some time looking for where the NeoOffice code could be improved.

After much evaluation, we found NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code does a lot of unnecessary work during slideshows and have made changes to our code to detect and skip such unnecessary work. With these changes, we have noticed signficant speed improvements when running slideshow presentations and when opening presentation files. The performance improvements are most noticeable on older machines or on machines with 512 MB or less of memory.