Since this is my first blog entry here at GullFOSS, I like to introduce myself. My name is Wolfram Garten, I'm 38 years old. I started working for Sun Microsystems in 2000 as a QA engineer for the graphics applications. Today I am the deputy team lead of QA Draw/Impress and I'm also the lead of the OpenOffice QA Graphics Team.

Besides from spending my workday on improving Graphics applications for StarOffice and OpenOffice.org I use Draw quite often in my private time for drawing plans and pictures. One of the functions that I miss most when dealing with pictures is the ability to crop pictures with the mouse. I do not want to use a complex dialog that is unhandy. I just want to drag with the mouse pointer to mark a selected area that should remain after cropping and get my result with one click.

Of course there is an existing OpenOffice.org Issue for this (i3545) and in my daily work I get a lot of feedback from users who need and want this functionality, too. But unfortunately our developers are busy with more important features. So I decided to specify the needed redesign in my free time and I found a developer who saw the same need for this improvement. Christian Lippka from the Graphics team supported me and helped in his free time to get this working. Great job, thanks again!

By now there is a quite good beta version implemented in CWS cropmaster2000 and there is not much work left to be done. So I hope soon this will make its way into the master build.

And this is how it works:

Selecting an inserted picture brings up the picture toolbar. Clicking on the cropping-button brings up 8 blue object-handles on the sides and angles of the picture. Moving the mouse cursor over these handles shows the cropping cursor. Now you can easily grab one of those and crop the picture by dragging these handles. It's as simple as that and works in Draw and Impress.

For everyone who still needs the complete cropping dialog this is still reachable using the context menu.

But I think that it is important to simplify functions wherever this is possible and this is what we have done here. The user should be able to reach the wanted goal within a minimum of mouse clicks and in an easy, intuitive way.

This feature is planned to make its way into StarOffice 9 / OpenOffice.org 3.0. If there are questions left please visit our OpenOffice.org Team site.

First of all, I'd like to thank everybody sending me their valuable feedback regarding my 'Comments on SVG'. Feedback like this is the only way for us to adjust our priorities, define our feature set and the roadmap in general. I'm now more convinced than ever, that we need a so called 'native' support of SVG ASAP. A solution that works most of the time under the hood and that enables OOo to treat SVG graphics like any other graphics format. In the end, SVG will then replace the WMF/EMF standard format used for vector graphics inside ODF documents.

Regarding my current Blog entry, I'd like to share some hot topics we're currently working on at the Sun OOo Draw/Impress team with you.

The hottest topic for me is definitely the work on our so called 'Professional Presentation Package'. This package will most likely be available as an OOo extension (to be installed on top of OOo), and providing an additional set of features that ease both the creation and the actual presentation of slideshows.

The whole package will contain several parts, that could also be installed on their own with no direct connection to each other. How this will be handled surely needs to be discussed in time, but for now, I'd like to concentrate on the features itself:

• A tool to assist you in giving a presentation is one of the topics, many people requested for quite some time now. This feature will be realized with the so called 'Presenter View', a view that is only visible to the presenter of the presentation. As such, it relies on the dual monitor support, that we already implemented some months ago.
  The tool itself will give the presenter a detailed view of the current slide as well as the slides before and after the current slide. It will also show the slide notes and it will allow the presenter to easily navigate through his presentation. Work on this is already ongoing and first results are visible. I'm already very 'impressed' with it...

• A tool called 'Presentation Minimizer', that allows to compact your presentation without losing the visible content at all. This tool mostly concentrates on optimizing the graphics and OLE objects used inside the presentation. There will be a reasonable set of switches for fine tuning the minimization process. Although this tool is almost finished, there are still some issues open that need to be solved before we can publish this.

• A bunch of additional 'Goodies' like a Multi document slide sorter to ease the creation of a presentation out of already existing presentation documents and many more. Details will follow...

The second hot topic is, of course, the MS XML (I did forget the right wording for this format) importer. We continuously work on this to support the community importing the MS XML format. I don't consider this to help spreading the MS XML format, but people should be able to exchange documents with others who didn't jump on the OOo train yet. Nevertheless, ODF rulez...

And last but not least, I'd like to mention that we're are on a really good track to have native table support in Impress. I really mean no faked tables, but real table support. This one is the feature that I personally missed a lot and it will also help us with our interoperability issues regarding tables. This is also work in progress.

So, that's it for the moment from the Sun Draw/Impress team. If you like to join us in developing or helping out with whatever you want to, please drop me a short mail. Every helping hand is welcome.