What

OpenOffice.org 3.2 introduces a new set of document icons (a.k.a. mime type icons). The new set gives ODF documents a clean and unique visual identity, and removes any product or vendor specific brand.

Why

In addition to reasons given in the ESC meeting on March 09, 2009, I would like to underline why it is important to strengthen the ODF brand at all.

End users hardly ever know that they use ODF, and if they do, they usually don't care too much. Is this something we should worry about? Yes. But what is the issue? In one word: Awareness.

Take a look at popular file formats, like JPEG, MP3 or PDF. In terms of awareness, they are well known. This makes users drive demand for their support. Imagine a digital photo frame that wouldn't support JPEG, a digital audio player without MP3 support, or a PC that cannot (by no means) display PDFs. Who would want to have this stuff?

How can we get end users to demand ODF support in a similar fashion? What can be done to raise the awareness of ODF? "Marketing" seems to be part of the answer, but what exactly do we want to market? Which particular visuals do you pick representing ODF so that end users recognize it in their daily life? How does the official ODF community logo translate to the large variety of different visuals used for ODF files on desktops?

A core strength of ODF - being supported by many applications - at the same time is a disservice to the ODF brand. Each and every ODF application uses their own set of ODF icons. That's more to the benefit of each of the applications, or the application vendors, than to ODF's. It gives users a fragmented impression of the ODF brand.

That's why we need to unify the ODF brand experience across all ODF applications and their vendors, starting where most users meet ODF: on their desktops. We want users to perceive ODF as the primary attribute of their documents. By doing so, we unify the ODF experience across applications - we continue to compete on application features, distributions, services, etc. But it becomes apparent to the user, that we all speak one language: ODF.

Last but not least, the unified icon set also takes into account that users collaborate more and more, where information (document) sharing is essential. A wide adoption of the new icon set conveys a strong sense of interoperability between users of different applications.

How

The new icon set deliberately puts "ODF" on top of the document icon. The distinction between different file types (text document, spreadsheet, presentation, ...) still exists, but has been toned down. Most important, we removed any product specific brand elements (the seagulls), and we eliminated any vendor related design (the "S" curve and specific colors).

The result is a very clean and modern icon set:

On one hand it gives ODF a unique and easy to recognize identity, while on the other hand it competes well in today's attention-grabbing icon-o-mania on user's desktops. BTW "desktop" also refers to typical folders, like "My Documents" or a user's home directory on Linux.

When

With After (see update) OpenOffice.org 3.2 the new icons will be available for the first time. Though we consider the design pretty mature, we know that evolving and refining these icons will be an ongoing process. But instead of elaborating forever on the design, we want to let users guide this process by giving feedback based on real-life use of OpenOffice.org.

A few words about the next steps. We are going to host the icons on the ODF Toolkit site, because they relate more to ODF than to OpenOffice.org. Of course OpenOffice.org will use them, like the next release of StarOffice will do, too. We would like all other ODF applications to go the same way. This was the original intent when we introduced the subject to the ESC, where stake holders of different applications and platforms are represented. We plan to release the icons as free and open as possible. By all means we want to avoid any sense of vendor or copyright lock-in. This will work only if it really comes free. Also, we are working with OASIS, to get their support for the new design. Most of these steps are currently work in progress, so please bear with us while we work on them.

UPDATE

After receiving a lot of really good feedback - in the comments section and especially on the mailing list discuss@ux - we decided to postpone the integration of the icon set until after OpenOffice.org 3.2. If you would like to work with us on this subject, please watch for more information on the mailing list.

tags: icon odf opendocument openoffice.org

Because some people asked me if we really addressed the issues mentioned here, I just wrote up what we did in my blog.

I don't want to replicate the full article here, so if you are interested, you can read the details here.

tags: odf ooo opendocument openoffice.org privacy security sun

A new version of ODFDOM - the OpenDocument Java API - has been released!
ODFDOM is an Apache 2 licensed Java library to easily create, access and manipulate ODF documents.

If you never have heard of ODFDOM, you might want to get a quick overview first.

With this release we made an enormous step forward!
It took us several months of continuous refactoring until we finally agreed on shipping this new release. 'We' are in this case Benson Margulies, David Eisenberg and a group of IBM and Sun developers.

The 0.7 is more than worth to be called a release, embracing several stunning new features, the best listed below:

ODF 1.2 support

ODF usability

To ease the DOM handling, every element now has methods to create their element children, requiring mandatory information as parameters. With this users no longer have to look into the RelaxNG schema to verify if an element is allowed as a child.
Furthermore there are methods to access all possible attributes of the element, as well as enumerations for their possible values.
Aside of elements and attributes there are now as well classes for all data types listed in ODF 1.2 (mostly W3C schema types, which now bear validate and helper functions).

Finally, the convenient layer of ODFDOM shows examples how easy a final API might look like.
For instance it is a simple three liner to

1. create a new ODF document,
2. add text and
   
3. save the new document.

OdfTextDocument odt = OdfTextDocument.newTextDocument();
odt.addText("My important text");
odt.save("MyExample.odt");

Documentation

David Eisenberg has contributed new tutorials.
Our JavaDoc has been improved. Now every single ODFDOM element/attribute class links to an XHTML version of the spec, where the functionality of the XML node is being described in detail. This spec is bundled with the JavaDoc (soon the spec will be separated in smaller pieces to speed up loading times).

Build environment

Last but not least, with the support by Benson Margulies, we were able to switch our build environment from ANT to Maven. By using Maven we made our dependencies declarative. We no longer add dependent JARs to our sources (e.g. the parser XercesImpl.jar), but are able to download them via Maven on demand. Following this idea of modularization, we were able to simplify the source structure of ODFDOM by moving our code-generation to an own new project called relaxng2template.

Still interesting challenges lie in front of us and we hope with this release we are able to arouse interests at like-minded developers to join our efforts!

I hope you all enjoy the new release!
Svante

tags: api java odf odfdom opendocument

I normally don't post my ODF Plugin news and information on GullFOSS, but so many people complain (everywhere, including in OOo mailing lists) about the bad ODF support in Microsoft Office 2007 SP2, that I thought it might be a good idea to post some information about the ODF Plugin here...

The Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office, which is based on OpenOffice.org, adds support for ODF to Microsoft Office 2000 and newer versions. So you don't have to use the very latest Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 version (in case you really need Microsoft Office for some reason) , where ODF support is insufficient anyway.

The ODF plugin still works in MS Office 2007 SP2, allowing document exchange between OpenOffice.org users and Microsoft Office users - which doesn't work in many cases when using the new built-in ODF support in SP2.

For more information about the ODF Plugin, news and additional information, feel free to read my blog regularly - I don't plan to start posting the same information here.

tags: odf ooo opendocument openoffice.org staroffice sun

This appeared to be a good opportunity to update the ODF Validator at odftoolkit.org (which we are using at Sun's OpenOffice.org development team to check ODF documents) to better support ODF 1.2. The update applies to the command line version of the tool, but also to the online version.

The changes I have implemented are:

• In regard to foreign elements and attributes, the “conformance test” mode (option “-c” in the command line version) now corresponds to the ODF 1.2 document conformance class (see ODF 1.2 section 1.4.2.1). Which means that foreign elements and attributes within ODF 1.2 documents are not permitted in this mode. This change does not effect ODF 1.0/1.1 documents, where they are still permitted.

• The “conformance test” mode is the default for ODF 1.2 documents.

• There is a new option “-e” (extended conformance), which corresponds to the ODF 1.2 extended document conformance class (see ODF 1.2 section 1.4.2.2) in regard to foreign elements and attributes. Which means that foreign elements and attributes within ODF 1.2 documents are permitted in this mode. For ODF 1.0/1.1 documents this mode equals the conformance test mode.

• It is now checked whether a document has at least a “content.xml” or a “styles.xml” sub stream. This corresponds to clause (D1.1.2) of ODF 1.2 section 1.4.2.2.

• It is now checked whether the “content.xml”, “styles.xml”, “settings.xml” and “meta.xml” steams contain the correct root elements. This corresponds to clause (D1.2.2) of ODF 1.2 section 1.4.2.2.

tags: conformance odf odftoolkit.org opendocument openoffice.org relax-ng rng validator

tags: events odf opendocument

As promised, just a quick heads up regarding the video of my talk at the OOoConf 2008. I uploaded it to Sun Learning eXchange, to make it more convenient to view ... and if I had known how, I would have placed it inline ;-)

Best regards

        Kay

Mailing lists

• announce@odf-at-www.openoffice.org
• users@odf-at-www.openoffice.org
• dev@odf-at-www.openoffice.org

Blog Postings

• 23 Dec 2008 - ODF@WWW - Video of my Talk at the OOoConf 2008
• 12 Dec 2008 - ODF@WWW - Heading for 0.1
• 14 Nov 2008 - ODF@WWW - OOo Conf 2008
• 26 Sep 2008 - ODF@WWW - Becoming an (Incubator) Project
• 01 Sep 2008 - ODF@WWW - Some State
• 22 Jul 2008 - ODF@WWW - Going forward ...
• 04 Jul 2008 - ODF@WWW - Simply Install
• 27 Jun 2008 - ODF@WWW -How it works
• 19 Jun 2008 - ODF@WWW (An ODF Wiki)

tags: document odf ooocon open opendocument openoffice openoffice.org video wiki

In my last posting I promised to notify you, the moment the video of my ODF@WWW talk on the OOo Conf 2008 becomes available. Peter Junge from RedFlag CH2000 just forwarded it to me, so I assume that it will be available to the public soon.

Meanwhile I was not lazy, some basic pages of the ODF@WWW project are there, the mailings lists have been created (though there is not much traffic yet), I nearly have fixed / implemented / changed most things to get a 0.1 ready and we now even have a picture of some core team members (Lutz, me, Stefan):

As Frank Peters recommended at the OOo Conf, we should directly use a ODF-Wiki to work on and to develop the ODF@WWW stuff. For exactly that reason I am heading for 0.1. The current version has been deployed at http://odf-at-www.services.openoffice.org , documentation is not complete yet and I am 100% sure there are issues.

If you want to help with the projects documentation etc. just drop me a note, I create an account for you on this brand new ODF-Wiki (account management is still missing ... as many other things ;-)

Have fun

        Kay

Mailing lists

• announce@odf-at-www.openoffice.org
• users@odf-at-www.openoffice.org
• dev@odf-at-www.openoffice.org

Blog Postings

• 12 Dec 2008 - ODF@WWW - Heading for 0.1
• 14 Nov 2008 - ODF@WWW - OOo Conf 2008
• 26 Sep 2008 - ODF@WWW - Becoming an (Incubator) Project
• 01 Sep 2008 - ODF@WWW - Some State
• 22 Jul 2008 - ODF@WWW - Going forward ...
• 04 Jul 2008 - ODF@WWW - Simply Install
• 27 Jun 2008 - ODF@WWW -How it works
• 19 Jun 2008 - ODF@WWW (An ODF Wiki)

tags: document odf ooocon open opendocument openoffice openoffice.org wiki

It took me a moment to catch my breath again coming back from this years OOo Conference. The Conference really was a great success and I would like to very much thank all the people (Flora, Peter, Mr. Hu, ...) and companies (IBM, Novell, Redflag CH2000, Sun, ...) who made it happen and who took care of all these little things people come up with during such an event.

Back to ODF@WWW. I luckily had the chance to present on ODF@WWW, which I enthusiastically did. You can download my presentation either as or as . For the ones which were not able to participate (and I think you really missed something :-),  you may want to take a look at the recorded talk, I am going to post it here the moment it becomes available.

One important milestone for the ODF@WWW thing now has actually been achieved. Since last week ODF@WWW is an Official Incubator Project :-) You find it's home page at http://odf-at-www.openoffice.org.

Best Regards

         Kay

tags: document odf ooocon open opendocument openoffice openoffice.org wiki

Today a new project has been announced: odftoolkit.org. I think that's exciting news for ODF. More information regarding odftoolkit.org can be found in the press release.

I have already signed up to odftoolkit.org, and I continue the development of ODF XSLT Runner, the ODF XSLT Runnner Task and the ODF Validator on odftoolkit.org.

tags: aodl odf odfdom odfvalidator opendocument xslt