A while ago I said I wanted to restructure printing in OpenOffice.org. As things usually go I was distracted by other things for a while (like e.g. getting an OOo 3.0 out of the door or some serious issues into 3.0.1). Recently however I got back to these plans and begin to see something. See here the new print dialog with preview.

The intent is to enable native print dialogs - see here the mac one:

And here's where the step backwards is: the preview of the nice aqua print panel is disabled, if you add your own controls (aka an "accessory view") to it and your application is still linked for MacOSX 10.4 (see here) - even if you use the new API mentioned which thanks to objective-C's late binding you can actually do. So it's drop either all the 10.4 users (about half of the Mac user base) or drop the preview on 10.5. Both unacceptable of course, we'll have to come up with something different; perhaps a two dialog approach (which also is less than optimal).

So when is this going to see the light ? I'm afraid not so soon. The extra controls you see in the pictures are functional, just the applications do not react on them - basically because everybody didn't have the time for implementation; Resources are stretched to the limit as they usually are. Also the controls are yet incomplete (the shown example is form impress; if you look at impress's options page you'll see there are more controls to be migrated). With feature freeze on 27th of November and half of the implementation not ready, this will not go into 3.1, but be delayed to 3.2. At least that gives us some time to come up with a better solution for the native aqua dialog.

tags: gsl mac ooo

Some years ago, Colm Smyth started and lead a discussion regarding the OOo GUI and its foundations, asking if and what we need to do to be future proof.

Though not the easiest task, I plan to revive the effort and would like to invite everybody interested to join it. First steps are likely about understanding any current weaknesses, gathering requirements and discussing suggestions where we want to head to ...

(a wiki page may help to organize this effort http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Chrome_Again)

Regards


   Kay

tags: chrome gsl gui openoffice.org user-experience

Thanks to Giuseppe Castagno's (aka beppec56) considerable efforts two improvements are now on their way into OOo. Barring unexpected tragic events, OOo 2.4 will have support for PDF/A, a feature often requested in governmental environments. The other improvement is OOo's handling of internal and external links in exported PDF documents which can now be customized to point to a structure of files interlinking.

This is really outstanding work, which met with some difficulties early on, but Giuseppe persevered and now we have his two PDF related CWS in QA, just in time for feature freeze.

Kudos to beppec56.
 

tags: gsl openoffice.org pdf

From 19th to 21st.September lots of people interested in OpenOffice.org joined OOoCon 2007 in Barcelona. Located at the University of Barcelona the ambiente was really stunning IMHO (you can see some impressions on the right side); Kudos to the organizers for creating such a great experience for the visitors.

Lots of interesting presentations, some of which may bring stunning new features to OOo (and tons of work for developers ;-) ) . Most notably for gsl I think are gravity zoo's plans to port OOo to their platform making OOo completely network transparent - I'll be interested to see how that works out - and the UI rework finally adding layouting capabilities to OOo's dialogs. On the mac front  we discussed a lot of issues, planning our move towards releasing the final mac version along OOo 3.0. An interesting proposal came from Michael Sicotte to integrate QuickTime to for media streaming to OOo Mac. And last but not least some issues were solved during the conference (well actually on the party after the conference :-) ).

 OOoCon 2007 certainly was a great success. And now that we're back let's put life behind the visions created here and make OOo still better than it already is.

Issue solution in progress

Planning for the future.

tags: community gsl mac ooocon openoffice.org vcl