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.

Currently the framework team works on OpenOffice.org 3.2 and compatibility with the Windows 7 file picker. If you use OpenOffice.org 3.1 or download the latest developement snapshot you will find out that the system file picker doesn't look like the default Windows 7 file dialog. This is just one issue you can stumble on while using the system file picker on Windows 7 RC1. The framework team created a CWS called filepicker01 (see http://eis.services.openoffice.org/EIS2/cws.ShowCWS?Path=DEV300%2Ffilepicker01) which includes all known issues regarding the system file picker. Fortunately we also have support from a community member to help on the QA part during the development. I want to thank Henner Drewes for his great support, his patches and feedback. This is a good example how people can support us to make OpenOffice.org better. Thanks to his help we could solve some issues in the CWS, especially stability is one of the major areas we are working on. Even new issues have been found and can now be fixed.

To give you an impression on the current state of the CWS you can see a screen shot of OpenOffice.org on Windows 7 RC1:

CWS filepicker01 based on DEV300m50 on Windows 7 RC1

Please keep in mind that this is work in progress and even the latest development snapshot doesn't include the fixes. Hopefully the first batch of fixes can be integrated into the master in the next weeks.

To get more feedback and find problems for Windows 7 early I would like to ask you for help. If you have access to Windows 7 RC1 or later versions and want to help, please join us. 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.

Today I want to continue the overview about the framework community contributions for OpenOffice.org 3.1 This time I want to thank Wu Yan from RedFlag 2000 who implemented a very important enhancement for extension developers. There were many complaints by extension developers as there was no easy way to associate keyboard shortcuts to extension commands. Previously it was only possible to do this via the UI configuration API. Wu Yan designed and implemented this enhancement with the help of the framework team. The following illustration shows the new design of the accelerator configuration used by OpenOffice.org 3.1.

^{Illustration: new accelerator design}

Extensions are part of the different configuration layers and therefore can provide accelerators easily with a configuration file within their extension package. The next illustration shows how one can define accelerators.

You can find the presentation Wu Yan held in Beijing in November last year here. It contains many more information about the design decision and his development work with OpenOffice.org. A chapter for the Developer's Guide and additional documentation for the framework wiki is in progress.

If you want to help us to make OpenOffice.org better please contact me via e-mail or join the framework development mailing list. Everybody is welcome to join us. The framework team will help you to have an easy start. Just give it a try to become a development member of the leading open source Office suite.

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.

We are now short before code freeze for OpenOffice.org 2.4 and the framework team tries to fix the last important issues. I think it's time to take a look at the new major version: OpenOffice.org 3.0. We have one project regarding the OpenOffice.org user interface where your feedback is warmly welcome. We want to brush up the existing keyboard customization tab page. It's the last customization tab page which uses the old OpenOffice.org 1.x layout so it's time to exchange it with a better design. I would also guess that this tab page is the most important one regarding customization. The only prerequisite is that the new tab page uses the same style as the other tab pages (e.g. menus, toolbars and events). We don't want to irritate users with a completely different style. You can see a screen shot from the current the keyboard customization tab page below.

The user experience team supports a mailing list where you can discuss this feature and provide design proposals. They are curious for your proposals and ideas to brush up this tab page, so please provide feedback.

If you have technical questions, please use the “dev” mailing list of the OpenOffice.org Application Framework project.

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 ).

New Application for Status bar control to display/change the language

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 within the Writer application. The user has to use the menu and a multi-tab dialog to choose the appropriate language. A status bar control which provides this function would greatly enhance usability for people who have to work with multiple language documents. We are making good progress and at half-time our student, Lili Sun from California (USA), implemented most of our required features for the status bar control. If anybody is interested to see the new control just try to build the CWS langstatusbar. I am sure that we can provide this great control for OpenOffice.org 2.4. To have an impression about the look of the feature you can find a screen shot from the latest CWS version below:

You can find more information inside the feature specification which is available here:
http://specs.openoffice.org/appwide/linguistic/Set_Language_Attribute_for_Text.odt

If you are interested in the progress of the feature task, just look at the following issue:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=77208

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) or the “discuss” list of the Openoffice.org User Experience project where you can discuss about the feature itself.