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Friday, 09 Oct 2009

Community work in the framework project – Part 2

Carsten Driesner

It's time to continue my little overview about the community work in the framework project. Today I want to enlighten the work on a new feature. Thanks to our volunteer Robert Zhou from CS2C we can start to implement it, which is currently targeted for OpenOffice.org 3.3. This feature is called:

Search Toolbar

Motivation

The motivation for this feature is to enhance the speed of searching text and to avoid a dialog window hiding the content of the document.

Goals

The goal for OpenOffice.org 3.3 is to provide a tool bar which will provide quick text searching without hiding document content. It shall include forward and backwards searching, search for all occurrences, case and whole word matching.

Below you can see the current mock up from the current search toolbar specification (late draft).

Due to the fact that we have a volunteer who is not very familiar with the all OpenOffice.org projects which are needed to implement this task, the feature set is limited. I don't think that this is a drawback as otherwise this interesting feature won't be included in OpenOffice.org soon. The feature should be available for Writer only.

Please keep in mind: There is no chance to ask for enhancements on the first run. The most important goal is to get this feature done. Enhancements and new features can be added if there is time and the volunteer is willing to continue his work.

Thanks to Jaron Kuppers, Robert Zhou, Stefan Baltzer, Zhu Lihua and Li Meiying who worked on the specification. The complete specification can be found on the OpenOffice.org wiki server:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Specification_search_toolbar

If you interested to help us we are looking for volunteers for QA, user experience and developers. There is no need to be an experienced open source volunteer. You can start with easy tasks and get familiar as time goes by. Therefore everybody who wants to join the OpenOffice.org community can provide valuable input. This is your chance to actively influence the progress of OpenOffice.org.

You can contact me via e-mail or subscribe to the framework development mailing list. Everybody is welcome. The framework team will help you to have an easy start.

tags: community framework openoffice.org

Posted by Carsten Driesner on 09 Oct 2009 | PermaLink |

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Comments

Tommy said:

this new feauture looks very promising!!!
have a nice work, guys!!!

Posted by Tommy on October 09, 2009 at 06:30 PM CEST #

JimYC said:

Hi there,

I like the idea because I found it hard to work with my text while searching something. But I wonder how this will be implemented. I mean there is a search dialogue natively implemented and an extension¹. How will the user know which to use? Different commands?
Moreover I wonder if this simple Search Toolbar can be implemented (initially) as an extension too? I know this question my sound stupid but might encourage early testers to help.

Regards
Jim

[1] http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/AltSearch

Posted by JimYC on October 10, 2009 at 05:11 PM CEST #

Christoph said:

Hi everyone!

Yep, this feature is highly appreciated and it is great to see it progressing :-) Although we already provide great search functionality in the Navigator, the Search Bar is a "small" enhancement which has real impact on how easy the work with OpenOffice.org is perceived. Thus, I had a look at the spec and collected questions and comments on the talk page in the wiki [1]. So if anybody is interested in this discussion, I propose to take part on the mailing list "ux-discuss".

Again, many thanks to the whole I-Team, and you Carsten for informing us!

Christoph

[1] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Talk:Specification_search_toolbar
[2] http://ux.openoffice.org/servlets/BrowseList?listName=discuss&from=2292699&to=2292699&count=2&by=thread&first=1&windowSize=1000

Posted by Christoph on October 11, 2009 at 02:10 PM CEST #

Carsten Driesner said:

Hi all,

Thanks for your comments. This will definitely help me to motivate our volunteer to keep up the good work. Currently we want to integrate the search bar directly into OpenOffice.org. Jim, thank your for the link to the enhanced search dialog. Tomas Bilek did a very good job to create this dialog in an extension. The first version of the search bar should be a quick tool to search for text. It's definitely not a replacement for the search dialog. We have to see if there is an easy way to connect both implementation. First of all I have to repeat myself, Robert Zhou is not a very experienced Writer API developer and therefore we should start with a simple but usable feature set. Christoph, thanks for your feedback on the specification. Stefan and I will look over your questions and comments. We want to provide answers as soon as possible, hopefully on Wednesday.

Thanks for your support and comments.

Regards,
Carsten

Posted by Carsten Driesner on October 12, 2009 at 05:04 PM CEST #