More development plans for the rest of 2014

[pluby]

Now that we have released NeoOffice 2014.3 and NeoOffice 3.4.1 Patch 8, I am pleased to report that we have finished all but one of the development tasks listed in last May's development plans for the rest of 2014.

Since we finished our development plans much faster than we expected, we now have the next 2 months available for new development tasks. Assuming Apple releases OS X Yosemite in late October, we probably won't see the expected surge in new bug reports that usually occur after Apple releases a new version of OS X until late November.

Over the next 2 months, we plan to backport LibreOffice's latest .docx import and export code. We have seen numerous people report that LibreOffice can read and save .docx files better than NeoOffice. Since NeoOffice uses the LibreOffice 3.3.4.1 code for .docx files, it is clear to us that the LibreOffice engineers have made significant improvements to their .docx code over the last 3 years. While LibreOffice's .docx code is not perfect (only Microsoft Word handles .docx perfectly), LibreOffice's code should help NeoOffice render many .docx files closer to Microsoft Word than how NeoOffice currently renders such files.

When we have the .docx backporting work done, we will post test patches that people can download. If the backporting of the LibreOffice .docx code takes less time than expected, then we will look at backporting LibreOffice's latest .xlsx import and export code.

Patrick