NeoOffice/J Press Kit

From NeoWiki

Contents 1 Writing a story about NeoOffice®/J? 2 Key Features 2.1 NeoOffice®/J vs. Microsoft™ Office vs. OpenOffice.org 3 Graphics & Images 3.1 Medium- and High-Quality Logos, Headers, & Application Icons 3.2 Screenshots 4 Background Information 4.1 History of NeoOffice®/J 4.2 Relevant Articles 4.3 Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQs) 4.4 Testimonials 4.4.1 VersionTracker and MacUpdate ratings and reviews 5 Community 5.1 Profiles 5.1.1 Patrick Luby 5.1.2 Edward Peterlin 5.1.3 Dan Williams 5.1.4 jakeOSX 5.1.5 Fridrich Štrba and the libwpd development team 5.1.6 Max Barel 5.1.7 Dan Bennett 5.1.8 Aelitis.com 6 What Else? 7 Discussion

Writing a story about NeoOffice®/J?

This Online Press Kit offers press materials and additional background information relating to the release of NeoOffice®/J 1.1 (see NeoOffice/J 1.1 Announcement). While the Press Kit gathers the most pertinent details and summaries, you will find useful related information elsewhere on this "wiki" web site.

Key Features

The NeoOffice®/J office suite is a powerful bundle of word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing applications for Mac OS X. Based on the latest stable OpenOffice.org codebase, NeoOffice®/J offers a full feature set that individual and business users alike expect from a complete office solution (see feature listing here).

NeoOffice®/J 1.1 extensively integrates OpenOffice.org with the Mac OS X experience. Key Macintosh features added to NeoOffice®/J but missing from OpenOffice.org include a standard Mac OS X installer, a native Aqua menu bar, use of the Mac OS X printing system, full clipboard support, drag-and-drop, Mac "command" key shortcuts, mouse scrolling, integration with major Mac email clients and native support for Mac fonts. NeoOffice®/J 1.1 is compatible with Mac OS X 10.2.x, 10.3.x, and 10.4.x.

Perhaps most significantly, NeoOffice®/J is free, open source software. By "free", we mean that unlike comparable office suites such as Microsoft™ Office, one may legally make and use as many copies of NeoOffice®/J as one likes—without expense or costly licensing fees. But "free" has a second meaning. NeoOffice®/J is open-source, meaning the source-code (the written set of instructions in computer language) has been "freed" for anyone to use, modify, or redistribute in accordance with a license created just for this purpose, the GNU General Public License (GPL).

NeoOffice®/J vs. Microsoft™ Office vs. OpenOffice.org

See our Feature Comparison page for a detailed comparison of three Mac office suites: NeoOffice®/J, Microsoft™ Office, and OpenOffice.org/X11.

Graphics & Images

These NeoOffice®/J logos, icons, and screenshots are in medium- and high-quality. Feel free to use them in print and or web coverage of the NeoOffice®/J 1.1 release.

Medium- and High-Quality Logos, Headers, & Application Icons

Screenshots

• The Official Screenshot at Planamesa Software.
• at this Wiki.
• A screenshot of an alternative icon set under development for the next release of NeoOffice®/J [pdf, 128 KB].

Background Information

History of NeoOffice®/J

• NeoHistory/relationship with OOo summary, link to the full version (1 pgh?)

Relevant Articles

• Links to other relevant articles [what do we want?]

Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQs)

• Links to design/development FAQ and/or some key FAQs reposted (not Java, but C++ (99%) and Carbon and Java (1%), "NeoOffice/J is a Mac OS X native version of OpenOffice.org that uses small amounts of Java code for graphics drawing and configuration." etc.)
  • Is Neo/J a Java Application?

    No, Neo/J is 99% C/C++ like the rest of OOo. NeoOffice®/J is a Mac OS X native version of OpenOffice.org that uses small amounts of Java code for graphics drawing and configuration.

  • Relationship with OOo
  • Why GPL [answer in planamesa/faq.php]
  • Next question? etc.
  • What are some non-design/development FAQs?
  • For more design/development FAQs, see design/development FAQ and the official Neo/J FAQ [? there are some "mean-but-true" answers there; do we want to link it?]

Testimonials

--Ovvldc 17:10, 21 Apr 2005 (CDT) Links to migration stories:
http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=1041 (anonCoward, falk, pd170)
http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=1223 (Glenner)
http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=1035 (Guest, but linked to from NeoOffice/J Feature Comparison)
http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=6153#6153 ()
http://bugzilla.neooffice.org/bug.php?op=show&bugid=529&pos=24 (see last comment, Felix S.)
http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=9137#9137 (a lite, general post from )
http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=1434 (Happy User)
http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=9314#9314 (Guest, signed as Phil)

Also try the Versiontracker feedback pages for upbeat stories.

VersionTracker and MacUpdate ratings and reviews

Community

Over the years, a vibrant NeoOffice®/J community has emerged at trinity.neooffice.org ("trinity"), where users and developers offer support, bug reporting, beta-testing, artwork, documentation, etc.

The community is a ever-expanding group of active users from all over the world who aid in the development, support and advocacy processes:

• writing NeoWiki articles that answer common requests for user assistance and support.
• answering questions and providing user support on the trinity forums.
• testing patches and filing bugs.
• translating the www.planamesa.com/neojava website and the wiki articles into several languages.
• working on new GUI (toolbar) icons.
• promoting NeoOffice®/J on the web, among friends and anywhere else.
• providing download mirrors and BitTorrent seeding.
• donating financially to help offset the costs of bandwidth and development.

Profiles

While the combined efforts of dozens of people have made possible the development of NeoOffice®/J and the 1.1 release, certain individuals have made sustained or key contributions to the code, infrastructure, and other areas of the NeoOffice®/J project. These individuals and their roles or contributions are briefly profiled below.

Patrick Luby

Patrick Luby (AKA pluby) is the creator and primary developer of NeoOffice®/J. He resides in Sunnyvale, California with his wife and children. He is a former lead engineer for Sun's Mac OS X port of StarOffice as well as a former lead engineer on the team for the Java 2 Enterprise platform.

Patrick now owns and runs his own software consultancy firm called Planamesa Software, specializing in short-term software development and debugging services in the San Francisco Bay area.

Edward Peterlin

Edward Peterlin (AKA OPENSTEP) is a co-founder of NeoOffice.org and main developer of NeoOffice®/J. He also provides much of the development and community infrastructure: the CVS server, the trinity forums, and the neooffice.org website. Ed also wrote NeoLight, the plugin for Mac OS X 10.4's Spotlight search engine, that ships with NeoOffice®/J 1.1. He resides in Santa Barbara, California. As a lead developer on the Mac OS X port of OpenOffice.org 1.0.x, Ed has been using Writer, Impress, and Calc on his Macs since 2000.

Ed is the lead Macintosh developer at BIOPAC Systems, Inc. and has many other interests, as demonstrated on his personal website.

Dan Williams

Dan William (AKA fa) is a co-founder of NeoOffice.org and a developer of NeoOffice®/J. He also provides and maintains the NeoOffice Bugzilla bug-tracking system. While Dan is not actively coding on NeoOffice®/J at the moment, he still helps out with bug triage, supplies an occasional patch, and keeps us appraised of many developments within OpenOffice.org. Dan was a main developer on the OpenOffice.org 1.0.x Mac port.

Dan works on OpenOffice.org with RedHat.

Fridrich Å trba and the libwpd development team

Fridrich Štrba is one of the main authors of the libwpd and writerperfect libraries used by NeoOffice®/J for import of WordPerfect™ documents; he integrated code written by the entire libwpd development team into NeoOffice®/J. Fridrich is a founder of the project to port Ximian/Novell Evolution to Windows and is a contributor to several other open source projects.

Outside of his open source endeavours, Fridrich works as a system engineer/network administrator of a research organization, admininstering a mix of Windows clients and Linux servers.

Max Barel

Max Barel (AKA Max_Barel) wrote the help installer for NeoOffice®/J 1.1, greatly simplifying the process of installing the localized help files available for several languages. He also takes the lead in answering French-language user support questions. Max spent over a decade as a developer and professor in programming and systems administration, and he currently works as a freelance system engineer and programmer [fr] for Mac OS X, Linux and PHP/MySQL.

Dan Bennett

Dan Bennett (AKA foxcorner) designed the new splash screen for NeoOffice®/J 1.1 just to see if he could, and he did the Aqua application icon simply because he wanted to know how it's done. Looked cool, and got adopted (the artwork, that is, not Dan). But he should probably keep his day-job in Hewlett-Packard's workstation division, working with high-end graphics solutions for automotive styling.

Aelitis.com

Aelitis of France has graciously offered to provide BitTorrent tracking and seeding for NeoOffice®/J, helping to alleviate the crushing bandwidth demands on the download mirrors.

What Else?

• Other things we should have here?

• Final Review: make sure we don't say anything disparaging about the OOo Mac porting team/need for X11 development work

• Insert __NOEDITSECTION__ tag at end of page before it goes live to remove all the distracting [edit] buttons.

• We have some Neo/J and some Neo®/J scattered all over this page. Let's be consistent on this page just like in the Announcement :-)

• Clean up abbreviations: Neo/J -> NeoOffice®/J, OOo -> OpenOffice.org, etc.

• Verify URLs (e.g., no www.trinity.org links running around)

Discussion

This trinity thread is for further discussion of the development of the Press Kit, as needed.

As we add items to the kit, we wipe out the "comments" or "place-holders" for them.