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.

For OpenOffice.org 2.4 this project wants to improve the handling of languages in Writer documents. Currently OpenOffice.org doesn't provide an easy way to change the language of a word, paragraph or text selection. The user has to use the menu and a multi-tab dialog to choose the appropriate language. A new status bar control should provide this function and enhance usability for people who have to work with multiple language documents. To get feedback as soon as possible from the community we decided to provide a test version of the new feature. Please keep in mind that this version is not yet feature complete but supports the most important part (the status bar control), and it is currently implemented for text documents only. Especially have a look at the implementation when using multiple script types. You should also be aware that the OpenOffice.org version is a snapshot from a developers build. Therefore don't use this version for your daily work but only as a test version for the status bar control.

You can find a OpenOffice.org version (based on SRC680m217) for Windows and Linux here:
http://ooo.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/cws/upload/langstatusbar/

The specification of the feature can be found here:
http://specs.openoffice.org/appwide/linguistic/Set_Language_Attribute_for_Text.odt

We prepared two test documents for the status bar control and/or language guessing. In the larger one the language is usually set wrong in order to test language guessing though. To test language guessing just right click on a wrong word and see the entry for the paragraph language.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/mwiki/images/e/e4/LGsampletexts.odt
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/mwiki/images/2/23/Samples_All_Languages.odt

If you have questions or comments about the feature, please use the “dev” mailing list of the Openoffice.org Application Framework project (in case it's technically motivated). Use the “discuss” list of the Openoffice.org User Experience project when you want to discuss about the feature itself (look & feel, missing features ).

OpenOffice.org 2.3 is coming soon and last week the last new features for this version have been integrated into the milestone m221 . A comprehensive list of all new features and enhancements can be found in our Wiki. Though the most remarkable changes in 2.3 surely are the improved Chart component (a complete reimplementation and replacement of the old one) and the new Database Report Designer the other teams of course didn't rest and so also provide a lot of bug fixes, enhancements and new features. As the Writer project lead I want to show you some of the improvements from the Writer perspective (and of course also from my own one).

Centered view in Writer

The most exciting enhancement in Writer may be that Writer now centers documents in their view – a feature that was requested for a long time. I hope you will enjoy it.

MediaWiki filter

I also want to point you to our new MediaWiki export filter. It is a contribution from Bernhard Haumacher and is very powerful. A Wiki page that was created with the filter can be seen here . As you can see from this page and the filter specification, it supports a lot of formattings and allows you to create nice Wiki content in OpenOffice.org, using your familiar environment. Currently it creates a text file in your file system (like every export filter) but there is some ongoing development that will make working with Wiki in OpenOffice.org even better and easier – stay tuned!

Language Guessing

OpenOffice.org is able to guess the language of a text. It doesn't work for single words as this is not enough text to analyze it sufficiently but it works very well for larger portions of text. We have integrated the Language Guessing component into the context menu of misspelled words and so now can present better suggestions for the language of a paragraph. The Language Guessing component also plays an important role in our improved language selection control that is currently developed in a Google Summer Of Code project .

ODF 1.1

The main topic of ODF1.1 is “ accessibility”. We have implemented some enhancements for this and the most remarkable improvement in Writer is the generation of “soft page breaks” in the XML file format. This feature allows ODF compatible applications to read or process documents generated by other ODF compatible applications to detect where the layout of the creator application made the page breaks. So they can get to know which text resides on which page without actually carrying out the layout themselves. This is particularly important for digital talking book formats.

Further improvements

Another addition that might come in handy for a lot of users is an option to change the behavior of line breaks (SHIFT-ENTER) in justified paragraphs. In OpenOffice.org 1.x the line before the break was not justified, but that was changed for documents created with OpenOffice.org2.0. An internal compatibility setting preserved the old behavior for all documents created with OpenOffice.org1.x and now (due to frequent demand!) users can use it also in new documents:

(Remark: due to the rule that options shouldn't be checked ON to switch something OFF the OOo1.x compatible behavior is achieved by switching the new option OFF).

In OpenOffice.org 2.3 there are a lot more small improvements and bug fixes and I just want to list just some of them because they are enhancements that come in handy for me:

• Our table support has been enhanced so that in new documents you will be able to create much more complex tables until they are screwed up. ;-)

• The “Styles and Formatting” window now keeps the selected styles filter (an enhancement that I desperately awaited myself!)

• Printer settings stored in documents can be ignored (you will like that feature if you move documents between different networks or between different parts of very large networks)

• The “Location” property in the “Document Properties” dialog now can be selected and copied into the clipboard (nice if the path is too long to be shown completely)

• The “Customize Keyboard” dialog was rearranged a bit and now looks better and is easier to operate. Sometimes things are so obvious that you wonder why you never had the idea to do it. So thanks to Kyrill Palagin for his nice suggestion !

• An interesting feature for developers: a new UNO service is available (com.sun.star.io.SequenceInputStream) that lets you use data you have as a ByteSequence wherever OpenOffice.org wants you to provide a stream. Nice one.

If you want to try out some of the improvements you can download the developer milestone m221. Please be aware that this version should be treated as a beta version that shouldn't be used for productive work.

For OOo 2.3 it is time to count the new implementations up. Feature Freeze was reached two weeks ago. 42 features and 212 enhancements are integrated and can be viewed and tested in build m221. The developer snapshot was announced by Joost Andrae 2 days ago. To get an overview about all integrated Features and Enhancements take a look at the following Wiki page : http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Feature_Freeze_Testing_2.3.

As for the past minor release some very old issues are integrated. Here are 2 of my favorites:

• 1761: The view of text documents is centered for Writer. This wish by community is nearly 6 years old and has 118 votes. It wasn't so easy to implement, but now it is realized.

• 41800 : The effect 'Move along curve' is re-implemented. This issue is 2,5 years old (with 128 votes) and describes the problem, which you could have, when you restructure a whole project. With the restructure of the presentation engine this effect where killed for OOo 2.0. But now it is re-implemented.

Beside the integration of some funny and very helpful enhancements, we shouldn't forget the major contributions for this release. One of the biggest is the new chart module. All information can be found here. Last but not least for security reasons in OOo 2.3 the Macro Security Default Level will change to High – see 79170.

This feature release was the first one with a release cycle of 6 months. A mass of changes were integrated and in nearly 2 weeks Code Freeze is planned and the release date should be hold at begin of September this year. The development and QA teams are working now on finalizing the version and on fixing major issues. So please take the developer snapshots and check the new features or do your daily work with this version. If you find major problems, please discuss them in QA mailing list and/or write an issue.

If you are interested in working with the QA project, please contact one of the OOo QA Team leads.

The official feature freeze date for OpenOffice.org 2.3 (5 ^th of July 2007) is coming near. The framework team is working on some interesting features for the new version. I want to give you an overview about these new features, especially extension developers and Windows Vista (tm) users will definitely profit.

Menu bar and toolbar merging for extensions

This feature makes it possible for an extension to integrate seamlessly into the OpenOffice.org menu bar or any existing toolbar. An extension can add new menu entries and sub menus, replace existing menu items or remove menu entries. This is also possible for toolbars. This feature allows extensions to look like an integral part of OpenOffice.org. It also overcomes the problem that currently most extensions create a top-level menu which can lead to an overcrowded menu bar. To support menu bar and toolbar merging the Addons.xcu file, a central configuration file for the user interface definition for extensions, has been extended. There are two new configuration sets called “ OfficeMenuBarMerging” and “OfficeToolbarMerging” which contain all merging commands that define how the extension menu and toolbar items should be merged into the OpenOffice.org user interface. There is no programming needed to achieve that, just specify your merge instructions into the new configuration sets and you're done. If the user removes the extension, the merged items will also be removed without any single line of code. You can find more information about the new merging feature with technical details on the “ work in progress” OpenOffice.org framework wiki page.

The next screen shot shows how an extension could integrate itself into the OpenOffice.org menu bar and the “standard” toolbar. The added items are marked with a red ellipse.

Support for Windows Vista Open/Save File Dialog

Currently the integration of OpenOffice.org into Windows Vista (tm) is not as good as we would like. Therefore we are working on the integration of the new file dialogs in OpenOffice.org. During the development of the dialog integration we stumbled over many different problems with the development environment and Windows Vista. Some are very interesting and we want to share it with you:

• Some early Windows SDKs for Window Vista were not complete (missing files and definitions). Even now, several months after Microsoft Vista is available, there are problems with missing definitions.

• The first C++ runtime libraries for the Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 8 compiler were incompatible between the Express and Professional compiler edition. Microsoft fixed that with the SP1 for the compiler.

• The documentation for the new Windows Vista features is not complete and error free. For example, the new interface IFileDialogCustomize can be used to add controls at runtime to the dialogs. The documentation states that you can control the position of the controls (with some limitations), but that's not possible. Sometimes methods (e.g. RemoveAllControlItems() ) report E_NOTIMPL which means not implemented.
  

You can see two screen shots of OpenOffice.org under Windows Vista.

1. The file open dialog.

2. The file save dialog.

For more information about the Vista integration of OpenOffice.org you can visit the Windows Vista (tm) Openoffice.org wiki page. If you have questions or comments about one of the features, please use the “dev” mailing list of the Openoffice.org Application Framework project (in case it's technically motivated) or the “discuss” list of the Openoffice.org User Experience project where you can discuss about the feature itself.