NeoOffice Press Kit

From NeoWiki

N.B. This is the general-purpose press kit for NeoOffice. (The press kit for NeoOffice 2.1, released in March 2007, is still available here, and the press kit for NeoOffice 1.1, released in June 2005, is still available here.)

Contents 1 Writing a story about NeoOffice®? 2 Key Features 2.1 NeoOffice vs. Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice.org 2.2 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) 3 Graphics & Images 3.1 Medium- and High-Quality Logos 3.2 Screenshots 4 Background Information 4.1 History of NeoOffice 4.2 Press Releases 5 User Testimonials and Migration Stories 6 Community 6.1 Special Thanks 6.2 Profiles 6.2.1 Patrick Luby 6.2.2 Edward Peterlin 6.2.3 Dan Bennett 6.2.4 Daniel Pimley 6.2.5 Armando Nava 6.2.6 Oscar Van Vliet 6.2.7 NeoWiki Translators and Editors 6.2.8 NeoOffice Support Team 6.2.9 Smokey Ardisson 6.2.10 FreeSMUG.org

Writing a story about NeoOffice®?

This Online Press Kit offers press materials and additional background information relating to the NeoOffice. While the Press Kit gathers the most pertinent details and summaries, you will find useful related information elsewhere on this "wiki" web site. We appreciate your interest in NeoOffice!

Key Features

NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation programs) for Mac OS X. We have created an office suite that is adapted to the unique needs of Mac users by taking the features in Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice.org office suite and adding improvements such as:

• Extremely stable Mac OS X code that has been in daily use by hundreds of thousands of NeoOffice users since 2003
• Significant speed improvements to the OpenOffice.org code
• Special services for our donors

Please see our Features page for a list of some of the Mac OS X features requested by our users that are in NeoOffice but are not in OpenOffice.org. The current version of NeoOffice is compatible with Mac OS X 10.4.11 and above, supporting both Mac Intel and PowerPC machines. An older version - NeoOffice 2.2.6 - remains available here for Mac OS X 10.3.9 users.

NeoOffice includes nearly all of the features in OpenOffice.org. The only OpenOffice.org feature that is missing from NeoOffice is Mac OS X Universal Access support. Unfortunately, we have not been able integrate OpenOffice.org's Universal Access code into NeoOffice so if you need Universal Access support, we recommend that you use OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Office, or Apple iWork.

NeoOffice Mobile provides a way to securely share NeoOffice files with other users and other computers. It works by allowing you to "publish" a document from within NeoOffice to the NeoOffice Mobile server using a secure, encrypted connection. Once documents are published, they can be viewed using secure connections from regular web browsers or web-enabled mobile devices. Also, for NeoOffice users with NeoOffice Mobile installed, previously published documents can be opened directly in NeoOffice.

NeoOffice vs. Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice.org

See our Feature Comparison page for a detailed comparison of three Mac office suites: NeoOffice, Microsoft Office, and OpenOffice.org Aqua.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

See our FAQ page for answers to the most commonly asked questions.

Graphics & Images

These NeoOffice logos, icons, and screenshots are in medium- and high-quality. Feel free to use them in print and/or Web coverage of NeoOffice.

Medium- and High-Quality Logos

A 600 dpi high-resolution version of the NeoOffice logo, suitable for print or publishing, is also available in JPG (1.4 MB) and PNG (10 MB) formats.

Screenshots

• The Official Screenshot at Planamesa Software.
• Fifteen screenshots at this Wiki.

Background Information

History of NeoOffice

NeoOffice's story begins in 2000 when Sun Microsystems cancelled its Mac OS X port of StarOffice and donated the partially-completed project to the OpenOffice.org community. The former manager and lead engineer of the port, Patrick Luby, was on hand to help with the transition. Although he moved on to other jobs at Sun and evenutally founded Planamesa Software, in his spare time Luby continued working to make OpenOffice.org run on Mac OS X without the X11 software used by other Unix variants to display Graphical User Interface (GUI) applications. Because the Java programming language was well-integrated with Mac OS X's "Aqua" interface, and because Luby had significant Java experience, he used Java to interface the core OpenOffice.org code with Mac OS X.

In 2002, two developers of the Mac OS X OpenOffice.org community porting effort, Edward Peterlin and Dan Williams, started an open source project at NeoOffice.org. They needed a stable, unchanging codebase in order to make sweeping changes to OpenOffice.org for Mac-specific work, which wasn't possible under the development system employed by OpenOffice.org. Peterlin and Williams worked on a new port, known today as NeoOffice/C, using Mac OS X's native Carbon and Cocoa toolkits.

In June of 2003, Luby open-sourced his Java-based port, which was incorporated into Peterlin's NeoOffice.org project as NeoOffice/J. The first NeoOffice/J binaries and source code were made available on June 19, 2003. Throughout the summer of 2003, Luby and the NeoOffice.org community worked together to improve the application. By fall of that year, NeoOffice/J 0.7 (based on the OpenOffice.org 1.0.x codebase) appeared with support for printing. The 0.7.x and 0.8.x releases that followed added full support for copy-and-paste, support for many languages, and other features and bug fixes. The final release of the NeoOffice/J 0.x series, NeoOffice 0.8.4, appeared on June 23, 2004, giving users a relatively stable version of the old OpenOffice.org 1.0.x codebase that offered a partially "native" Mac OS X experience.

Over the year that followed, Luby and Peterlin, with help from Williams and the NeoOffice.org community, moved NeoOffice/J to the then-current OpenOffice.org 1.1.x codebase and added significant "native" Mac features, including drag-and-drop, use of the Mac OS X menubar and "Aqua menus," enhanced multilingual support, and dozens of smaller features and GUI improvements that make the application more at home in Mac OS X. The June 22, 2005 release of NeoOffice/J 1.1 (based on OpenOffice.org 1.1.4, the latest stable codebase at that time) marked not only the culmination of a year-long version 1.1 development effort, but also several years of early "behind-the-scenes" trial and error by the developers, the testers, and the entire NeoOffice.org community.

Following the successful NeoOffice/J 1.1 release, Luby and Peterlin began laying the groundwork for supporting Apple's Intel-based Macintoshes. A series of 1.2 releases of the renamed NeoOffice followed, bringing users support for reading international standard OpenDocument file formats and fixes from the latest stable OpenOffice.org 1.1.x codebase while the developers began to focus their efforts on NeoOffice 2, which would be based on the OpenOffice.org 2.x codebase. As development continued into 2006, early builds were "pre-released" for NeoOffice supporters and bug-hunters as part of an innovative Early Access Program, which helped raise funds to support the project.

The NeoOffice 2.x series brought full support for Intel-based Macs and dozens of new features gained by the switch to the OpenOffice.org 2.x codebase, as well as many new Macintosh-specific features—native open and save dialogs, improved printing support, fantastic new Finder icons, the beginnings of a new icon set, and perhaps most significantly, nearly complete "Aquafication" of scrollbars, buttons, and other "widgets" that led to the beta releases being officially dubbed "NeoOffice 2.0 Aqua Beta". Subsequent additions included support for VBA macros in Microsoft Excel documents, import filters for Microsoft OpenXML Word documents, and other advanced features developed by Linux distributors through the ooo-build process.

The NeoOffice 3.x series has added a host of new and exciting features requested by users: Quick Look support, Media Browser support, trackpad gestures, and Mac OS X Leopard grammar checking, Mac OS X Snow Leopard support, the NeoOffice Mobile online document sharing solution, native Mac OS X text highlighting, smoother text kerning, ongoing expansion of the Akua icon theme and Leopard-optimised Finder icons.

Press Releases

For a more extensive history of NeoOffice versions, please see the official press releases:

• NeoOffice 3.0.2 Early Access Program
• NeoOffice 3.0.1
• NeoOffice 3.0
• NeoOffice 2.2.5
• NeoOffice 2.2.4
• NeoOffice 2.2.3
• NeoOffice 2.2.2
• NeoOffice 2.2.1
• NeoOffice 2.1

User Testimonials and Migration Stories

For other testimonials and migration stories, see the NeoOffice 2.1 Press Kit and the NeoOffice/J 1.1 Press Kit.

Additional testimonials and user reviews can also be found by visiting the NeoOffice listing on the popular Mac software download sites VersionTracker and MacUpdate.

Community

Over the years, a vibrant NeoOffice 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 download.neooffice.org/neojava website and the wiki articles into several languages.
• working on new GUI (toolbar) icons.
• promoting NeoOffice 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.

Special Thanks

The NeoOffice community would like to extend special thanks to the anonymous donor whose generous contribution funded most of the NeoOffice 2.1 development work and the 12 NeoOffice mirror sites which handle up to 4 terabytes of downloads every month.

Profiles

While the combined efforts of dozens of people have made possible the development of NeoOffice and the 2.1 release, certain individuals have made sustained or key contributions to the code, infrastructure, and other areas of the NeoOffice 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. He was the manager and lead engineer for Sun's effort to port StarOffice to Mac OS X as well as the lead engineer for the Tomcat Servlet Container within Sun's Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) development group.

Patrick is now the chief engineer for the NeoOffice.org project.

Edward Peterlin

Edward Peterlin (AKA OPENSTEP) is a graduate of Princeton University with an engineering degree in Computer Science and a certificate in Engineering Physics. He is the founding developer of the community OpenOffice.org Mac OS X (X11) porting effort and a co-founder of NeoOffice.org and main developer of NeoOffice. 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 has shipped with all version of NeoOffice since NeoOffice/J 1.1. 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. He has presented at many conferences including Apple's WWDC, O'Reilly's Mac OS X Conference, and Linspire's Desktop Linux Summit.

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

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. Dan was so chuffed when he learned Mac|Life selected the NeoOffice icon to be “one of the Best Mac Icons ever.”

Daniel Pimley

Daniel Pimley (AKA djpimley) designed the new splash screen for NeoOffice 2.0 Aqua Beta and the new Finder icons, as well as some of the new icons in the Akua icon set used inside the NeoOffice 2.x and 3.x series. Born and bred and living in London, Great Britain, in real life Daniel is a video editor and multimedia producer, working in internal communications for an investment bank. He's been fiddling with computers since he fell in love with his Amiga 500 many years ago. Nowadays he dabbles in Mac programming, design and computer art as a hobby, as can be seen from his website.

Armando Nava

Armando Nava (AKA Punto_Mac) designed the vast majority of the new Akua toolbar icons in the NeoOffice 2.x and 3.x series. He has an licentiate degree in Graphic Design at Universidad La Salle (Mexico City). He specializes in Internet and multimedia.

Oscar Van Vliet

Oscar Van Vliet (AKA ovvldc) is a long-time contributor to the NeoWiki and to the Trinity forums. Oscar was one of the early pioneers of the custom icon set efforts, and he contributed a number of icons to the final Akua set that is the default in NeoOffice 2.1. Oscar works on sustainable transportation in the Netherlands.

NeoWiki Translators and Editors

The NeoWiki is available in five languages thanks to the tireless efforts of a group of editors and translators who write and/or translate articles that assist users in making the best use of NeoOffice. Of the many people working on the wiki, the following have made the largest contributions over the past few years. Before her death, jgd translated a large number of articles from English to French, added many new articles in French, and translated some of them to English. valterb produced a nearly complete Italian version of the wiki in only a few months and has contributed an number of new articles in Italian and English, too. RoyFocker likewise made the Spanish version of the wiki a reality in just a short time and contributed new articles on styles. Lorinda added a number of new articles, revised and polished others, and translated into English many of the articles that existed only in French. In the last year, James3359 has written several new articles in English.

NeoOffice Support Team

A number of NeoOffice community members help every day in the forum, helping users with questions and problems and reproducing bugs so that developers can fix them. Among the most active are Samwise, James3359, , and Lorinda.

Smokey Ardisson

Smokey Ardisson (AKA sardisson) is the NeoOffice champion of end-user support. He is responsible for bringing a large part of this information into the NeoWiki and also leads the NeoOffice advocacy effort. The NeoOffice document icons displayed by the Finder in releases from NeoOffice/J 0.8 to NeoOffice 2.0 Alpha were also his work. During the road to NeoOffice 2.1, Smokey did less of the actual work and served more as a coordinator of efforts of the ever-increasing number of individuals who donated large chunks of their time to help out other users of the software.

FreeSMUG.org

FreeSMUG.org has provided BitTorrent tracking and seeding for NeoOffice 1.2.2 and 2.0 releases, helping to alleviate the crushing bandwidth demands on the download mirrors.

NeoOffice® is a registered trademark of Planamesa Inc. Other product and company names may be trademarks of their respective owners.