Posted: Fri May 10, 2013 12:42 pm Post subject: Development plans for the rest of 2013
Now that we have finished the App Sandbox implementation work described in last September's development plans, now is a good time to give an overview of what development projects we plan to work on through the end of this year.
In the past, Apple has made big changes in every new version of Mac OS X. Since keeping up with Apple's Mac OS X changes takes a lot of our time, Ed and I try to anticipate what changes Apple is likely to make in the near future so that we can start implementing those changes as early as possible. Our experience is that the legacy Mac OS X functions that Apple has marked for removal and Apple's Mac App Store submission requirements give us a pretty good idea of changes that Apple will make in future versions of Mac OS X that will affect NeoOffice.
From the above, Ed and I have identified the following changes that we think need to be made to ensure that NeoOffice will run on future versions Mac OS X. Given the complexity of some of these changes, we expect that implementing these changes will require all of our development time for the rest of 2013:
Native buttons, scrollbars, and other Mac OS X controls
Apple continually removes legacy technologies with each new version of Mac OS X and warns developers well in advance by marking functions to be removed as "deprecated". While we have already removed nearly all of functions that Apple has deprecated, NeoOffice still relies on Mac OS X's "HITheme" functions to draw native buttons, scrollbars, and other Mac OS X controls.
Apple recently marked the "HITheme" functions as deprecated so we will reimplement each of the native buttons, scrollbars, and other Mac OS X controls in NeoOffice one by one. Our plan is to replace the HITheme functions with real Cocoa buttons, scrollbars, and other Mac OS X controls. Implementing real Cocoa controls is not likely the simplest approach, but we think it will be the most stable solution as it does not require using deprecrated or undocumented Mac OS X functions.
Mac OS X 10.9
While we do not know when Apple will release the next version of Mac OS X, our past experience is that each new Mac OS X version brings a new set of bugs that we must fix. Additionally, Apple sometimes adds new features that Mac OS X applications are expected to implement such as Mac OS X 10.7's Versions and Full-screen features. Unfortunately, the amount of development work that we will need to do for Mac OS X 10.9 is unknown at this time. Once we have access to Mac OS X 10.9, we should be able to identify the development work that we will need to do.
Since adding lots of new code might cause new bugs, we plan on posting frequent test patches so that we can release a small part of the above changes in each of the official NeoOffice official patches that we release through the rest of this year.
Stability is still our primary goal so fixing any critical crashing, hanging, and data loss bugs reported in our Neooffice Support forum will continue to be our highest priority.
Half a year has passed and you seem to have reached these goals quite successfully (or are there still some HITheme replacements to be done?).
The Mavericks launch seems to have gone rather well, judging by the lack of a torch-carrying mob on the fora .
Might you give us a hint of your ideas for the end of the year and some of 2014? _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Half a year has passed and you seem to have reached these goals quite successfully (or are there still some HITheme replacements to be done?).
The Mavericks launch seems to have gone rather well, judging by the lack of a torch-carrying mob on the fora .
I think you are equating posting volume with our workload. The torch-carrying mob has started to arrive in the Mac App Store. In contrast, the people able to post on these forums tend to post more concrete, workable issues so, thankfully, these forums don't reflect what the mob has to say.
ovvldc wrote:
Might you give us a hint of your ideas for the end of the year and some of 2014?
We have not had time to even think about what is next. Ed and I have been working crazy hours all summer and fall preparing for Mavericks and for the last month we have been buried with moving all our web and mail servers (our webhosting provider tried to strongarm us into moving everything to a different OS in a data center with very flaky uptime).
We were hoping that we could use Mac App Store reviews as a source of potential new features. Unfortunately, many of the reviews seem to be people venting the same old story about how NeoOffice doesn't meet their standard of perfection and/or that their $10 payment doesn't include free support from the developers.
Clearly many such reviews are venting from people who want gold plated service for tin prices so we ignore such unrealistic and infeasible expectations. So, since we aren't getting any useful feedback from users, we'll continue working on the stuff that we know users will eventually need. Off the topic of my head, there are two big areas that we can work on that will easily fill our time:
- Fixing OpenOffice and LibreOffice crashing bugs - The OpenOffice and LibreOffice code that NeoOffice uses is still full of crashing bugs so Fran has started this NeoWiki article to try to identify a list of known crashing bugs that we can work on.
- Compiling NeoOffice on Mac OS X 10.8 - In a future version of Mac OS X, we expect Apple will remove the ability to run applications compiled using the gcc compiler and so we need to move all of the OpenOffice, LibreOffice, and NeoOffice code to the clang compiler
Sounds like a good plan to me _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
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