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.

The Google Summer Of Code 2007 (tm) initiative from Google was a great success for OpenOffice.org and the framework project. The framework team has two active projects within OpenOffice.org. These projects should help users to work more efficiently with OpenOffice.org. Please look at the following description of these two projects.

• New Application for Status bar control to display/change the language
  by Lili Sun, mentored by Carsten Driesner and Thomas Lange

  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.

• Improve UI Design and Layout
  by Ricardo Pereira de Magalhães Cruz, mentored by Michael Meeks

  Currently, OpenOffice.org interface layout is compiled into the binary and its format is not suitable for working on with a visual designer. Also, the layout is specified in absolute coordinates, which make it a hassle to add or remove widgets, and can result in truncated widgets due to internationalization. I propose to work on separating the UI writing from the code to XML-based files, and having the layout being expressed in relative terms.

I want to focus on the status bar control to display/change language. A first draft specification of the new language control in the Writer status bar can be found here:

Below you can see two mockups which show how the new language control should be embedded into the Writer status bar.

The current language will be shown within the control or “Multiple Languages” if there is more than one language (e.g. a paragraph or selection with more than one language). A project wiki page has been set up so anybody who is interested on the progress of the project can find more information. If you have question or comments 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 a discussion is already in progress.

There are more interesting projects cooking within the framework project:

• The tabbed windows extension
  This extension draws attention by many users. Therefore we created a new wiki page to focus on the discussion about the future of this interesting feature. See also the blog on GullFoss from Mathias Bauer.

• OpenOffice.org configuration items refactoring
  OpenOffice.org uses wrapper classes to access configuration files. These wrapper classes have their own caching mechanism. There is a big drawback using this caching mechanism as it hinders extension developers to use the configuration API to change OpenOffice.org behavior (e.g. history and pick list etc. ). The code refactoring should remove the caching and therefore enables external code (extensions) to use the configuration API. The “ recent file list” popup menu controller tutorial will greatly benefit from this refactoring.

“Tabs” in OpenOffice.org is one of the features that many people would love to see but due to numerous reasons still is not done yet. Nearly two years ago we started with a first prototype to find out whether it is basically possible to add this feature to OpenOffice.org without rewriting major parts of the code base. To prove this we decided to implement this as an extension and made it a Google Summer Of Code project. The project was successful and delivered the desired extension for a “tabbed” document windows prototype in OpenOffice.org. As a side effect it was a good demonstration for the powerful OpenOffice.org application framework and extensions infrastructure. Read more about that here .

As easily discernible the GUI is still very “raw”, it's really only a prototype. And it still has bugs and some features are missing or got lost.

What we learned from this prototype was that besides the pure technical facts there are a lot of other questions we have to answer and some problems we have to solve before the component could become “ready for prime time”. When we started to discuss them we discovered very soon that this won't be a fast-track procedure. The feature richness of OpenOffice.org and its GUI demands for an in-depth analysis of the many situations that deal with windows and the multitude of different kinds of content presented inside of them. Compared with OpenOffice.org the feature set, the modes of operation and the versatility of the content in a Web Browser are rather trivial and this makes implementing a “Tabbed Document Interface” (TDI) in OpenOffice.org a much bigger challenge.

We never found enough time and resources to bring the results of all these discussions together into a common concept and many points are still open. So now we want to present a collection of open questions and possible answers and ask for feedback. Perhaps this could help to speed up things a bit.

Get the extension and play with it. Read the questions and problem descriptions and post your answers to 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 (if you are more interested in the user interface aspects).

For the brave developers amongst the readers there's also the source code of the extension. You can build it with our SDK on Windows, Linux or Solaris and play around with your own ideas. Feedback related to the implementation should go to the mentioned “ dev” list of the Framework project.

It's still a way to go for this feature and quite some work to do. And we should never forget that for the work to be done finally someone has to pick up the tab (pun intended ;-)). So the potential result should be something worth the invested time.

Besides some formalities the first steps will be to familiarize with the task, the project , the environment and clarify the schedule for deliverables with the mentors. According to the official timeline coding work will start in May and after a mid-term milestone in July the end of the program is planned for August.

Let's welcome our new project members and also the students already known to the community . Please support them and their mentors during this summer.

The Tasks:

The deadline for student applications has been extended to Tuesday, March 27, 2007, 12:00 AM UTC.

This gives you some more days to skim over our task proposals. Feel free to raise questions on the project mailing list mentioned in the task description or suggest new code related ideas at the appropriate OpenOffice.org project.

Please submit your application early to allow questions if necessary. Good luck!

Late in the night (US Pacific Time) the news about the organizations accepted for Google Summer of Code ™ 2007 has been sent out. Thanks to Google for running the program this year again and inviting OpenOffice.org to participate.

For students considering to spend their summer with OOo we prepared project proposals . The application period for students end March 24. This gives you some time to contact us on the mailing list mentioned with the task and clarify the scope, required skills, ... We hope to receive many detailed student applications in the next days.

Thanks go also to the (potential) mentors willing to work with a student over the summer. Let's see how many slots will be alloted to OOo at April 9.

In order of appearance on our GSoC page :

Cedric Bosdonnat (CedricBosdo at openoffice.org)
Ocke Janssen (Ocke.Janssen at sun.com)
Frank Schoenheit (Frank.Schoenheit at sun.com)
Niklas Nebel (Niklas.Nebel at sun.com)
Leonard Mada (discoleo at openoffice.org)
Laurent Godard (LaurentGodard at openoffice.org)
Andreas Schluens (Andreas.Schluens at sun.com)
Carsten Driesner (Carsten.Driesner at sun.com)
Thomas Lange (Thomas.Lange at sun.com)
Jan Holesovsky (kendy at openoffice.org)
Fridrich Strba (fridrich_strba at openoffice.org)
Dieter Loeschky (Dieter.Loeschky at sun.com)
Eric Bachard (ericb at openoffice.org)
Florian Heckl (fheckl at openoffice.org)
Noel Power (noel.power at novell.com)
Mathias Bauer (Mathias.Bauer at sun.com)
Henning Brinkmann (Henning.Brinkmann at sun.com)

This time Google Summer of Code 2007 is in the focus of the framework project. Summer is coming near and the framework team has two interesting projects for students who want to earn some money and contribute to OpenOffice.org.

1. A status bar control to display/change the language of a Writer document
   Currently Writer lacks means to display the language in use. There's also no easy way to change the language as the user has to use the menu. A status bar control would help to solve these problems. The control should be implemented using existing UNO APIs and should be available as an extension.

2. Extensions to better support some new Vista
   Vista changed its mechanism to integrate some shell extensions incompatible. Extensions which are valid for Win98/2000/XP don't work anymore. A set of new interfaces has been designed, but are only available on Vista. Therefore OpenOffice.org has to support two sets of shell extensions: one set for Win98/2000/XP and a new set for Vista and following windows versions. For this project the new Vista extensions has to be implemented.

You can find the full list of Google Summer of Code projects 2007 regarding OpenOffice.org here:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2007

One example for the success of the Google Summer of Code projects is the OpenOffice.org Tabbed Window extension. The project was created for Google Summer of Code 2005 and finished successfully. Thanks to Andrzej Wytyczak-Partyka, former Google Summer of Code student, and framework project member Andreas Schlüns this project will be continued. A current developer version can be downloaded on the framework wiki page. It's planed to provide the extension on the OpenOffice.org extension web page if it reaches a final state. A screen shot (OpenOffice.org 2.1) with Tabbed Windows extension can be seen below.

The extension supports OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 and higher. Please keep in mind that the current extension is a developer version. Therefore it can create problems with your OpenOffice.org installation and crashes cannot be excluded. Please don't use it for your production system, but just as a preview.

The popup menu controller tutorial is short before final state where developers can download the C++ source code and the a ready to install extension. A Java version of the sources will follow. Please stay tuned for an announcement on the developer mailing list.
The first chapter of the new OpenOffice.org status bar and controllers tutorial is now online. It describes the internal architecture of the status bar, responsible configuration files and UNO services.