As you could read with the last developer milestone ( DEV300m60) we reached the date to branch the code line for the OOo 3.2 release. The strings for translation were extracted from this milestone and were integrated into Pootle. Also the last features were integrated. So all teams can start to do their work to get released a full localized and stable build of OOo 3.2 at the end of November '09.

Some weeks ago I announced here that I will finalize the feature-list for this release soon after the last build with the last features is ready for use. I am ready and you can check the wiki page, if you are interested in all feature announcements for OOo 3.2. The list includes the issues numbers, the feature announcement, the specification, the test case specification and the CWS name. As you can see this isn't the 'What's New Guide'. This list should help testers and translators to identify the new features and check if it works as estimated and/or as specified. So please take a look at :

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Feature_Freeze_Testing_3.2

To get a deeper look at some features I collected some blogs about the new stuff in OOo 3.2 :

• Introduction of the new UNO AWT Grid Control
• Security and Privacy Feature Improvements in upcoming OpenOffice.org 3.2
• Graphite Support
• Community work in the framework project – Part 1
• Saving sheets separately: Preliminary results
• The framework project, OpenOffice.org 3.2 and Windows 7
• Chart performance
• Unified ODF Icons (approved to integrate in OOO320m1)

As I could read in the meeting minutes of the Release Status Meeting from yesterday it was approved to release a Beta version in some days. It should be the build OOO320m2, where some show-stopper issues are fixed. If you are interested to give feedback you can use the mailing list releases@openoffice.org. If you want to promote a critical issue for the final release do not hesitate to communicate it also on that mailing list – as soon as possible –. If you are interested in currently known show-stoppers you can check the list of issue 99999.

Last week we had a face to face meeting of the “notes2” team in Hamburg. It was the first time where all members came together at one place – until then the work was completely done remotely in different parts of Germany. We started with a Google Summer Of Code project in 2007 and continued as a team that works together for quite a year now.

We think that our little project was very successful, but nevertheless we wanted to look back a little and talk about our “lessons learned”. Here's a short list of things that aren't new at all but that we consider to be important especially for remote team work:

• While meeting agendas are a good thing to have always, they are indispensable for IRC meetings.

• It's good to become acquainted with each other early and know more about everybody's background and motivations. This makes it easier to understand and trust each other. So if possible a face to face meeting in the beginning is desirable.

• We should have used telephone conferences much more often; we used e-mail too much.

• It was good not to plan for a fixed release and instead define the minimum feature and quality requirements for a first possible release.

• Not all decisions can be made by the whole team, and so it shouldn't be tried. Instead of this the team members need common guidelines they have agreed to.

• Use cases are a very useful way to define such guidelines. Personal preferences should be hold back as much as possible.

• Discussions shouldn't be exhaustive in all cases, but it is important to point to technical limits and errors as soon as possible.

But of course the most important insight was that we all had a lot of fun working together and that we think that we created a considerable value for the product. That's what working in a community is about – and I hope that we can have more like this in the future. So if you know something you want to implement in Writer, but need some help – just let me know. :-)

Of course we also talked about future plans for the “notes” feature and the new notes sidebar we created for it. We want to start implementing them in OOo 3.1 and continue in the following releases. Here's what we came up with. You might be pleased to read that work on the first items is already in progress. :-)

As Christoph Noack happens to be the Co-Lead of the OOo User Experience team, we took the chance to meet with the User Experience team members Christian Jansen and Frank Löhmann in Hamburg also and made it a “ what we always wanted to discuss about Writer usability improvements” meeting. We identified some topics that we see important and that we want to include in the upcoming project review that is planned to happen in early September (right after my vacation ;-) ):

• An "Insert page" function that frees users from dealing with several single steps just to e.g. insert a landscape page

• "Insert page number" also as a one-step function

• Improve other functions dealing with page styles (allow to describe which pages shall be influenced by the change etc.)

• "Delete hyperlink" function in the context menu of text formatted as a hyperlink

• “Accept/Reject Changes” in the context menu of changed text

• Add (a) Landscape style(s)

• Use transparent selection in Writer as in the other OOo applications

• Add a Change Tracking option "don't show deleted text in track changes" and use it by default

• Status bar improvements

The mentioned changes in the Change Tracking feature look even better if you add the planned “show change tracking comments in sidebar” feature from our list of “ notes” enhancements!

Here's a picture of the exhausted ;-) team after a long meeting:

From the left to the right: Christoph Noack (UX), Éric Savary (QA), Max Odendahl (Dev), Mathias Bauer (Dev)

Today I want to give you a new overview on what features and enhancements we are working on in cooperation with the RedFlag 2000 framework team.

We enhanced the “Change Icon” dialog again to enable user to import images more easily. Currently users have to scale their images to the two supported icon sizes (16x16 for small icons and 26x26 pixel for large icons) before they can import these images. Although this solution enables users to use their own tool set to scale images it sets a high hurdle for others. Sometimes users just want to import images and use them as quick as possible. The new import images implementation now automatically scales images, while preserving their aspect ratio.

The next picture gives you an impression how the new scaling implementation works.

The specification for this enhancement can be found here. If you want to discuss this enhancement, please use the user experience team mailing list.

The configuration data structure of some OpenOffice.org features are another topic where the RedFlag2000 framework team helped us. Especially the configuration data for pick list, history and help bookmarks are now based on separate configuration files with a clear structure. This enables developers to create extensions which can use these data structures to support new features. For example it will be possible to create an enhanced version of the pick list with options to clear the list, to change the number of entries. The access code of other configuration data has been rewritten to remove overhead, have a clearer implementation and to process data changes at runtime.

The cooperation with the RedFlag 2000 framework team is on a very good level and OpenOffice.org will clearly benefit in the future with more features, enhancements and bug fixes.

What's up?
Last feature release for OOo?
No!
It's the last feature release on code base 2.x!

The next release will be the last release with features and enhancement based on OOo 2.x code line. In the very next days the way will be opened for OOo 3.0 with opening the code line for integration (better to say, the code line for OOo 2.4 will be split to tag OOH – but this is the technically point of view).

What's new in this feature release? It's a mass. There are more features and enhancements integrated than in the past releases. Round about 50 Features and 150 enhancements are integrated. Some of them are more visible others are smaller changes which aren't important for everyone.

I want to highlight some areas

• More support for OOo extensions
  • support for online help in an extension (issue 20164, specification)
  • online update for extensions is possible (issue 82775, specification)
  • OOo search for updates of extensions (issue 82851, specification)
• PDF/A (ISO 19005-1) support for PDF export (issue 59651)
• HTTPS support in OOo for WebDav (issue 31053, specification)
• 'Block selection' in text documents (issue 1596, specification)
• ...

This is a very small collection. You found some feature announcements There are many many more enhancements in all applications of OOo. If you want to have a technical introduction of all these new features and enhancements, you can find them in the OOo-Wiki at http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Feature_Freeze_Testing_2.4. Feel free to use this list for testing and checking the new features. This list isn't the release note, because OOo 2.4 isn't ready until now. Code Freeze for OOo 2.4 is in mid of January '08 and the final bits are estimated for begin of March '08. So take the developer snapshots and identify the critical issues before the release.

Today I want to report about features that were implemented with the help of the RedFlag 2000 team. They will be part of OpenOffice.org 2.4. Liang Weike, a member of the Open Source Framework team from RedFlag 2000, helped me to implement a persistent user image list. It can be used to import your own icons into OpenOffice.org and use them to change toolbar icons. Importing icons was possible with previous OpenOffice.org versions, but now the imported icons are stored persistently within a user image list. Users are not forced to import the same icons again and again, but can create their own icon repository for later use. The “ Change Icon” (see the image below) dialog, the central dialog which supports changing and importing icons, has been reworked to also support the deletion of user icons.

I think this is a successful story how we, the community, can make OpenOffice.org better. Big thanks to Liang Weike who worked hard to implement the feature and fixed all other issues related to the “Change Icon” dialog.
You can find more information about the “Change Icon” dialog in the toolbar specification located at the OpenOffice.org specification project here.

The second enhancement is related to the “print file directly” toolbar button, which resides on the standard bar (next to the PDF export button). Some community members proposed to enhance the quick help text to show the name of the printer which is going to be used when clicking on the button. See the following mock up.

The community wrote the specification, thanks to Kirill Palagin who is a very active member, for the enhancement. Implementation was done by Liang Weike with the help of the framework team. The CWS will be built and provided to the community to make the necessary tests. You can find the specification for the enhancement here . Everybody who thinks that this little enhancement could help him/her is welcome to help us testing. Installation sets are located here . If you have questions or comments to the enhancement you can contact me using cd{at}openoffice.org.