Aqua Port: Three times faster!

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Wednesday, 06 Feb 2008

Aqua Port: Three times faster!

Herbert Duerr

The amazing new features in the aquavcl05 child workspace have already been mentioned. Regular user of OpenOffice.org's Aqua port might find plain bug fixes interesting too: The application performance increased by a factor of almost three for doing common tasks such as loading or saving big files.

This success was possible by identifiying and fixing a bug that killed application responsiveness, by identifying and avoiding unnecessary and expensive repaints and by accelerating some expensive queries which could sometimes be completely satisfied by short-circuiting to cheaper code.

Another annoying bug you might have noticed when working with the current Aqua port was that the application sometimes didn't progress until you "helped it" by e.g. moving the mouse. My fix to the event handling code will fix this problem for good.

On the performance frontier I'm confident that I can shave of another 10% of the loading/saving time of long documents soon. I'm also pondering about providing early visual feedback when loading documents. A change that would probably improve the application's perceived responsiveness considerably. The current behaviour, which is to load a document completely before showing just one page, doesn't fit into the 21st century.

What else is cooking here? When editing text in our Aqua port you might have noticed the problem of "dancing characters", which is being attacked. The Aqua port has some important PDF export issues. All of our ports currently have problems when PDF exporting text with unicodes outside of the base plane. Supporting PS-OpenType subsetting is also on my TODO list. There are some outstanding insights and patches for BiDi and complex text layout, which need to be integrated carefully, so that all use cases are covered. And then there is the huge mountain of "normal" bug reports that require developer attention...

tags: mac openoffice.org

Posted by Herbert Duerr on 06 Feb 2008 | PermaLink |

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Comments

joe said:

great! any chance of a public alpha yet?

Posted by joe on February 06, 2008 at 05:09 PM CET #

hduerr said:

Development snapshots are available at http://download.openoffice.org/index.html already. New stuff like macosxdnd, aquafilepicker02, nativeprintdialog01, aqua11y01 or the mentioned aquavcl05 will be available in new snapshots soon.

Posted by hduerr on February 06, 2008 at 05:20 PM CET #

joe said:

ha! i didn't even know that, i thought there are still X11 versions for mac on that page.

double thanks!! :)

Posted by joe on February 06, 2008 at 08:04 PM CET #

Ralph Aichinger said:

Does that mean, you will fix OpenType subsetting and embedding for all platforms?
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=43029

That would totally rock!

Posted by Ralph Aichinger on February 07, 2008 at 08:15 AM CET #

hduerr said:

Sure. OOo 3.x will have it.

Posted by hduerr on February 07, 2008 at 11:27 AM CET #