Patch and Release Announcements

[pluby]

After we released the last NeoOffice 3.3 patch nearly 2 months ago, we have been busily fixing any critical bugs that were reported in our NeoOffice Support forum and we have included fixes for the following critical bugs in NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 4:

• In certain cases, the NeoOffice menus in the menubar would become unresponsive
  
• Printing certain documents that contained linked images would cause NeoOffice to hang or crash
  
• Highlighting tables with certain Writer documents would cause NeoOffice to become unresponsive for a few seconds
  
• Certain scanners would cause NeoOffice to crash when the dialog that lists connected camera and scanners was displayed
  
• When contour wrapping was enabled for certain images in Writer documents, portions of the images would be clipped

In addition to the above bug fixes, in NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 4 we have added the following new features that were requested by users in our NeoOffice New Feature Requests forum:

• Toolbars are visible and are no longer automatically hidden when in Full-Screen mode
• Cell pasting options in Calc's Paste Special dialog are preserved after relaunch
• The maximum number of rows that autocompletion searches through in Calc spreadsheets has been increased from 200 to 16,384 rows

NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 4 can be downloaded from the NeoOffice 3.3 patch download page by users that have paid US$10 (or €7 or £6 or CA$10 or AU$10 or ¥834) or more within the last year.

If you have any support questions, a list of suggested steps for finding an answer for a problem as fast as possible is available on the NeoOffice Support page.

[pluby]

After we released the last NeoOffice 3.3 patch in January, we have been busily fixing any critical bugs that were reported in our NeoOffice Support forum. We have fixed the following critical bugs and included our fixes in NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 5:

• NeoOffice would not launch when the user's home folder is on a remote volume
  
• When opening .docx files with tables, NeoOffice would missize table cells that span multiple rows or columns

In addition to the above bug fixes, in NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 5 we have added the following new features that were requested by users in our NeoOffice New Feature Requests forum:

• Status bar displays word count for Writer documents
• Color palettes are automatically set to the document's selected text color

NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 5 can be downloaded from the NeoOffice 3.3 patch download page by users that have paid US$10 (or €7 or £6 or CA$10 or AU$10 or ¥834) or more within the last year.

If you have any support questions, a list of suggested steps for finding an answer for a problem as fast as possible is available on the NeoOffice Support page.

[pluby]

In the last 2 weeks we have had quite a few new users purchase our direct support service. Unfortunately, we can only reasonably provide this service to a fixed number of users and now we are very close to that number of users.

So, to avoid overselling our direct support services, we have limited purchase of our direct support service to only users who have made payments to us in the past. We will eventually remove this limitation once the 1 year direct support period has expired for a portion of our users.

While we wish we could provide direct support to a larger number of users, our engineering resources (Ed and Patrick) is very limited so selling more direct support services than our tiny operation can reasonably provide would not be fair to the users that have already purchased such services.

[pluby]

Very soon after we announced that we were temporarily limiting purchase of direct support, an unexpected number of users purchased direct support purchases.

Unfortunately, this latest batch of direct support purchases has now pushed us past the fixed number of users that we can reasonably support so we are no longer selling direct support from the NeoOffice engineers to new users. The NeoOffice engineers can only provide this service to a small number users and so, to avoid overselling this service, we have temporarily disabled the purchase of this service.

[pluby]

After we released the last NeoOffice 3.3 patch in early March, we have been busily fixing any critical bugs that were reported in our NeoOffice Support forum. We have fixed the following critical bugs and included our fixes in NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 6:

• Opening .docx files with a specific set of formatting attributes would cause NeoOffice to crash
  
• Zooming a document could cause NeoOffice to crash
  
• When scrolling using the mouse wheel while another application is active, NeoOffice would move its backmost window to the front

In addition to the above bug fixes, in NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 6 we have added the ability to open LibreOffice password protected files.

NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 6 can be downloaded from the NeoOffice 3.3 patch download page by users that have paid US$10 (or €7 or £6 or CA$10 or AU$10 or ¥834) or more within the last year.

If you have any support questions, a list of suggested steps for finding an answer for a problem as fast as possible is available on the NeoOffice Support page.

[pluby]

Over the last few months, the U.S. dollar value of the Euro, British Pound, and Japanese Yen has dropped significantly. As a result of this drop, payments made in these 3 currencies now convert to less than the U.S. dollar payment amounts that we charge.

Since all of the NeoOffice project's expenses must be paid in U.S. dollars, we have updated the Euro, British Pound, and Japanese Yen payment amounts on our website and users will now see the following amounts for 1 year of NeoOffice downloads: US$10 (or €8 or £7 or CA$10 or AU$10 or ¥1011).

Any payments made in any of these 3 currencies prior to this change will automatically use the exchange rate that we were using when the payment was made.

[pluby]

After we released the last NeoOffice 3.3 patch a month ago, we have been busily fixing any critical bugs that were reported in our NeoOffice Support forum. We have fixed the following critical bugs and included our fixes in NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 7:

• Using the trackpad scrolling gesture could cause NeoOffice to crash
  
• Saving to remote volumes that are not in the machine's local network could be abnormally slow

NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 7 can be downloaded from the NeoOffice 3.3 patch download page by users that have paid US$10 (or €8 or £7 or CA$10 or AU$10 or ¥834) or more within the last year.

If you have any support questions, a list of suggested steps for finding an answer for a problem as fast as possible is available on the NeoOffice Support page.

[pluby]

After we released the last NeoOffice 3.3 patch over two months ago, we have been busily fixing any critical bugs that were reported in our NeoOffice Support and Testing forums. We have fixed the following critical bugs and included our fixes in NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 8:

• NeoOffice would immediately quit after launch when running on any of the Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks developer preview releases
  
• NeoOffice would sometimes crash when closing the Printer Settings dialog that is displayed after selecting the File :: Printer settings menu
  
• NeoOffice would crash when trying to access the Apple Address Book if the user is running Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and the user has chosen to deny NeoOffice access to the Apple Address Book
  
• The menubar would sometimes have no menus after opening a document in the File :: Recent Documents menu
  
• PDF files created using the Export to PDF feature from documents containing Apple's Bangla font would not display text correctly in Adobe Acrobat Reader
  
• Strikethrough of text would not display when the strikethrough character is set to "X" or "/"

NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 8 can be downloaded from the NeoOffice 3.3 patch download page by users that have paid US$10 (or €8 or £7 or CA$10 or AU$10 or ¥834) or more within the last year.

In addition to the bug fixes listed above, we have reimplemented drawing of native push buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, comboboxes, and listboxes in NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 8. Up until this patch, NeoOffice relied on Mac OS X's "HITheme" functions that Apple has marked as deprecated to draw native controls. Since Apple will likely remove the HITheme functions in a future version of Mac OS X, NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 8 draws the native controls listed above using only Cocoa code.

Lastly, in NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 8 native Save dialogs are no longer displayed as a modal dialog window and, instead, are displayed as a "sheet window" attached to a document window like in Apple's Safari and TextEdit applications.

If you have any support questions, a list of suggested steps for finding an answer for a problem as fast as possible is available on the NeoOffice Support page.

[pluby]

Soon after we released NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 8, we found that some of the special code that NeoOffice uses when running on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was inadvertently disabled.

Although this bug does not affect users running Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and higher, for users running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard this bug would cause such things as native scrollbar arrows to not work and content to be drawn behind the native window growbox.

Since a significant number of our users are running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and this bug can be very annoying for those users, we have fixed this bug and included the fix in NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 9.

If you have already downloaded NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 8 and you are running Mac OS X 10.7 or higher, you will not see any changes and there is no harm if you do not install this patch. Users running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, however, are encouraged to install this patch.

NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 9 can be downloaded from the NeoOffice 3.3 patch download page by users that have paid US$10 (or €8 or £7 or CA$10 or AU$10 or ¥834) or more within the last year.

If you have any support questions, a list of suggested steps for finding an answer for a problem as fast as possible is available on the NeoOffice Support page.

[pluby]

After we released the last NeoOffice 3.3 patch last month, we have been busily fixing any critical bugs that were reported in our NeoOffice Support and Testing forums. We have fixed the following bugs and included our fixes in NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 10:

• When opening a new document or displaying a dialog, NeoOffice would allocate but never release some memory which would eventually cause excessive memory usage
  
• NeoOffice would sometimes crash when rapidly closing several documents via pressing the window titlebar's red "close window" button
  
• Sometimes when dragging text or images within a NeoOffice document, the mouse had to be clicked a second time to end dragging and insert the dragged content
  
• NeoOffice would crash when importing certain PDF files into a Draw document

NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 10 can be downloaded from the NeoOffice 3.3 patch download page by users that have paid US$10 (or €8 or £7 or CA$10 or AU$10 or ¥834) or more within the last year.

In addition to the bug fixes listed above, we have reimplemented drawing of native scrollbars, progress bars, text fields, stepper buttons, and group boxes in NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 10. Up until this patch, NeoOffice relied on Mac OS X's "HITheme" functions that Apple has marked as deprecated to draw native controls. Since Apple will likely remove the HITheme functions in a future version of Mac OS X, NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 10 draws the native controls listed above using only Cocoa code.

If you have any support questions, a list of suggested steps for finding an answer for a problem as fast as possible is available on the NeoOffice Support page.

[pluby]

Immediately after we released a patch for NeoOffice 3.3 earlier this week, we updated NeoOffice 2013 to include all of the following bug fixes in the latest NeoOffice 3.3 patch and submitted the update as NeoOffice 2013.1 to Apple's Mac Apple Store:

• When opening a new document or displaying a dialog, NeoOffice would allocate but never release some memory which would eventually cause excessive memory usage
  
• NeoOffice would sometimes crash when rapidly closing several documents via pressing the window titlebar's red "close window" button
  
• Sometimes when dragging text or images within a NeoOffice document, the mouse had to be clicked a second time to end dragging and insert the dragged content
  
• NeoOffice would crash when importing certain PDF files into a Draw document

NeoOffice 2013.1 can be downloaded from the Mac App Store. If you already purchased NeoOffice 2013, no payment is required to upgrade to NeoOffice 2013.1. To upgrade, launch the App Store application on your Mac, sign in using to your iTunes account, and press the Updates toolbar button. If you have NeoOffice 2013 installed, you should see a NeoOffice entry listed. Press the "Update" button in the NeoOffice entry and the App Store application should download and upgrade your NeoOffice 2013 installation to NeoOffice 2013.1.

In addition to the bug fixes listed above, we have included our reimplemented code for drawing native scrollbars, progress bars, text fields, stepper buttons, and group boxes that was included in NeoOffice 3.3 Patch 10.

If you have any support questions, a list of suggested steps for finding an answer for a problem as fast as possible is available on our NeoOffice in the Mac App Store page.

[pluby]

Now that Apple has released Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, we have released NeoOffice 3.4. This release includes all the fixes for bugs that we found during our several months of Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks testing.

In addition to fixes for Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, NeoOffice 3.4 includes the following new features:

• New Cocoa code for buttons, scrollbars, comboboxes, tabs, and other native controls
  
• Automatic installation of Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish language packs

We recommend that NeoOffice users upgrade to NeoOffice 3.4 if they plan to buy a new Mac or upgrade their existing machine to Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

NeoOffice 3.4 can be downloaded from the NeoOffice download page by users that have paid US$10 (or €8 or £7 or CA$10 or AU$10 or ¥1011) or more within the last year.

If you have any support questions, a list of suggested steps for finding an answer for a problem as fast as possible is available on the NeoOffice Support page.

[pluby]

Since we have seen a sudden increase in the number of reviews in the Mac App Store complaining of lack of free support and/or imperfect document import, we assume that our presence in the Mac App Store has inadvertantly attracted the notice of many users who are not familiar with how we operate.

So, have modified the wording on both our main website and our Mac App Store description to much more bluntly state that we do not provide free support and NeoOffice is based on OpenOffice and LibreOffice so we aren't perfect.

We understand that many new users coming from OpenOffice or LibreOffice may expect free support or imperfect Microsoft Office compatibility, but that is not how we operate and we have no intention of changing how we operate.

We have been working on NeoOffice for 10 years and during that time we have focused on the following two goals:

- Improving the stability of the OpenOffice code on Mac OS X
- Adding native Mac OS X features

While OpenOffice and LibreOffice are focussed on new features, we will continue to focus exclusively on fixing crashing and hanging bugs and keeping up with Apple's Mac OS X changes.

That said, we do look at the Mac App Store reviews to see if a new feature is requested in several reviews. If we see 10 or more reviews requesting the same new feature, we will definitely evaluate the feasibility of implementing the new feature in a future version of NeoOffice.

[pluby]

Effective immediately, NeoOffice 3.3 users that have paid us US$10 (or €8 or £7 or CA$10 or AU$10 or ¥1011) at anytime in the past can download NeoOffice 3.4 without having to pay again.

Normally, download access expires 1 year after making a payment. However, we want to ensure that NeoOffice 3.3 users have our latest fixes before they upgrade to Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks. So, we have temporarily extended download access for NeoOffice 3.3 users.

NeoOffice 3.4 can be downloaded from the NeoOffice download page.

[pluby]

We have released NeoOffice 3.4.1. This release includes fixes for the following bugs that we found after we released NeoOffice 3.4 in October:

• Opening certain .docx and .pptx documents would cause NeoOffice to crash
  
• Changing any NeoOffice Writer :: Print settings in the Options dialog would disable printing of word processing documents
  
• Zooming using the trackpad would cause the current document to zoom in and out too rapidly

We recommend that all NeoOffice 3.3 and 3.4 users upgrade to NeoOffice 3.4.1.

NeoOffice 3.4.1 can be downloaded from the NeoOffice download page by users that have paid US$10 (or €8 or £7).

If you have any support questions, a list of suggested steps for finding an answer for a problem as fast as possible is available on the NeoOffice Support page.