I got the mail some minutes ago that the CWS SRC680/aquavcl04 has been cloned from SRC680 to OOH680 code base which will be the one for OpenOffice.org 2.4.

This is a big step forward to release a new preview of the Mac OS X port of the office suite.

Tino is working on Drag & Drop (CWS: SRC680/macosxdnd, this CWS implements native Drag&Drop for Aqua OOo on Mac OS X)

Tino demonstrated me in the tube of Hamburg his work on drag and drop

Florian on the file picker (CWS: SRC680/aquafilepicker02 , this cws is for the migration of the native file pickers on MacOSX from Carbon to Cocoa.) which should be ready for QA on monday. These CWSes and the aquavcl04 should be enough to release a next preview of that what we will be one day (based on the OpenOffice.org 3.x code base) the native OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X.

In the meanwhile the automated GUI testing has also set-up the test environment to do 24/7 automated GUI testing soon also on the Mac like we are doing with all other platforms Sun is supporting, too.

tags: mac openoffice.org porting

The Mac porting team is again on its way to demonstrate how good it can be to have motivated team members and well documented processes: Mike Sicotte asked me if there is a software specification needed for the QTKit adoptions to get QuickTime running inside OpenOffice.org for the Mac. The existing implementation does not work on the Mac.

The enhance the specification process-team has documented in the specification process a small helper page how to decide when a software specification is needed and I gave Mike the link.

He decided to write a software- and a test case specification! The child workspace (CWS) is still under development but in the testing department already has every information they need to estimate the time needed to test the new feature - transfer of information to the right time. The test case specification has been copy&pasted into the TCS (test case specification) tool and can be used for the child workspace test cycle.

Mike, you made my (a testers) day!

tags: mac openoffice.org porting specification

Mike Sicotte asked on IRC (channel: #ooo_macport, network: freenode.net) how to get his Mac OS X spell checker implementation into OpenOffice.org. Eric Bachard asked me if I could volunteer as Quality Assurance representative and the implementation team (i-Team) was simply formed. It is some weeks ago and now the changes to the code are on its way into the master build of OpernOffice.org.

CWS:macosxspellchecker

Mike wrote the software specification and implementation, Thomas Lange looked into the code of the linguistic part, Pavel Janik also looked into the code and helped to modify the makefiles that the other builds are not affected, Matthias Mueller-Prove reviewed the software specification made the string review, .... it is a pleasure to work with such highly motivated people! I have done the process things like writing a feature announcement, writing a test case specification, running required [automated] tests to get the CWS "nominated".

We all have had one goal: To get this done until the OpenOffice.org Conference 2007 will start and we did it! It was really a great team work.

Also the "sister" child workspaces ("aquavclcarbonfixes", "macaddressbook01") have had the same time frame and also these i-teams were highly motivated to get it done until OOoCon in Barcelona. Also they did it - congratulations!

We will have fun with many new features and if you want to see what is in the new developer snapshot: Walking on water - hot news from the Mac OS X Aqua port (Wednesdsay, 12-12:45h (MESZ), Barcelona, Spain, OOoCon.

tags: mac openoffice.org porting

What's new in the Mac port ?

• improved native look of controls (e.g. native background for dialog windows)
• mouse enter and leave events are received now
• the event loop was improved for better speed.
• testtool has begun to work
• cursor traveling works better now
• XOR rendering (e.g. gradients now look like they should)
• PDF export works now
• Basic printing works now
• Clipboard support works now
  

As always there may be bugs still, also some implementations are not yet feature complete (e.g. printing)

For a more detailed log of changes please have a look at Eric's place.

One more item to add: CWS aquavcl01 is closed now, we're on our way into the main CVS tree.

tags: mac openoffice.org porting

From Monday, June 11th to Friday 15th some of the OOo Mac porter team visited the Apple World Wide Developer Conference to get input from Apple's developers concerning our porting effort. We learned some rather important facts that will change the direction of our Mac port considerabley and Apple's developers and UI specialists gave us very constructive criticism; of course there is a lot to do to look like a Mac application since we currently have a more old fashioned interface.

So what did we learn ? Well foremost: Carbon is a dead track, we really need to change our application to utilize the Cocoa framework. This will cause us quite an effort, especially since our native widget framework won't work with Cocoa. The reason is simple: unlike Carbon which has a themed drawing API with HIToolbox, Cocoa won't let us simply draw controls (buttons, menus and so on), so either we have not native look (completely unacceptable) or we use real native controls. Welcome back to the glorious days of StarView (for those who were born in those olden days :-) ). Also, ATSUI is going the same way, being replaced by CoreText - which as of yet is not even feature complete from our point of view since it cannot yet extract glyph polygons.

There is however one bright light in this news: we can do the change gradually since Carbon can be called from Cocoa, so for a transitional phase we can use the NWF framework as is until we can get native controls to work (which will probably open a whole can of worms unfortunately).

Moreover we learned a lot of UI changes needed from a Mac user's point of view (see our report at the OOo wiki for details). Some of these changes would be beneficial for our other platforms, too, I think, but we will need to discuss with ux what we actually want to do.

Also I learned that an old hypothesis of mine is true: developers don't mix well with sunlight. On the sunday before WWDC I played a little at being a tourist and managed to get a massive sunburn. Please insert your favorite joke about a Sun developer getting burned by the sun here :-)

tags: mac openoffice.org porting wwdc

Since the last blog entry created a little stir I'd like to post a short update about the progress made in between:

• Considerable work was done to make fonts work more like expected. This is an ongoing task.
  
• AquaSalGraphics was changed to paint only to a single context. Additionally the need to set the graphics state (clip path, colors, font attributes) for each graphics call was removed. The changes brought a noticeable performance increase.
• Lots of crashes originating from events dispatched to dying windows were fixed.
• Busy painting (which should be eliminated in the future) can now be done using the Window::Flush method. And suddenly slideshow effects worked :-)
• Work has begun to use system settings like application font and similar.

For a complete list please have a look at Eric's ChangeLog.

My personal thanks go to the people of the Mac port community who make all this possible.

tags: mac openoffice.org porting

I visited Herbert and Philipp in their room yesterday to evaluate a Mac-specific thing in our Sun environment. We used Herberts session and I asked "Do you have an office?" and Herbert started the latest result of his work and ....WOW! Great progress - I have seen the latest build as Pavel added the toolbar to the top. Herbert was very enthusiastic about the progress of his work.

In the evening I joined the IRC channel of the Mac porting community of OpenOffice.org to talk to some members. Eric B. asked me if I could have a look to a new native build he has made with the latest CVS chganges of the day and I agreed. Again WOW! What a great progress. It really makes me happy to see the native Mac OS X file picker dialog to load and save documents. It makes really fun to see no X11 starting in the background. Never I have hoped to see that so fast!

Great jobs guys and many, many thanks to get the dream true I have written to my software director on 5^th Oct 1998! At that time the name Rhapsody was more known than Mac OS X ;-) So, keep cool and don't agitate - I have waited nine years...

tags: apple mac openoffice.org porting

I'm excited to let you all know that as of now Sun engineering will add its support to the ongoing Mac/Aqua porting effort.

The MacOSX porting history is basically as old as OpenOffice.org itself. Practically from the start there was the plan to have a native version for Mac, however as a first step the community decided to produce an X11 port which - since OOo already had several X11 ports from the start - seemed to be a good way to get a version quickly as temporary solution. As usual the "temporary solution" tended to be quite long lived (year 2000 bug anyone :-) ?).

You can imagine my excitement when I first heard about renewed efforts to make an Aqua port reality. And now finally I can spend my paid time to add to this great effort. At first Herbert Dürr and I will contribute to the Mac port, however there certainly will be other Sun developers involved in their areas of expertise when the need arises (e.g. when problems with the build system arise).

Some may ask: Why is Sun joining the Mac porting project? If you look around at conferences and airport lounges, you will notice that more and more people are  using Apple notebooks these days. Apple has a significant market share in the desktop space. We are supporting this port because of the interest and activity of the community wanting this port. The new invigorated effort in Mac/Aqua-porting (basically since CWS aquavcl01) is an obvious indicator. I think this is the right way to go to make OOo on Mac as good as or even better than the other ports. Add in the growing Mac community as a whole and suddenly from Sun's point of view Mac has a higher value since our strategy is to be multi-platform capable.

MacOSX and Aqua are quite new to me, so please bear with me as I learn about this (for me) exciting new platform at first. Certainly I will have many questions for my fellow Mac porters. However I can contribute  ~10 years experience with vcl which I think the port can benefit from.

How do we want to proceed ? At first Herbert and me will try to get an overview about the current state  of the work, which already has quite a lot of functionality thanks to the great work of  the active Mac porters. I imagine that event handling and painting should be our first objective; Herbert specializes in Text drawing via SalLayout implementations and I will have a look at paint handling at first which I have heard on the mailing list needs to be improved and adapted to the specialties of the Mac platform and will need some support from the system independent layer of vcl (painting should be done mostly inside the paint handler). After that I could imagine that input needs to be improved e.g. for internationalized input as in input methods.

Let's make this port a great success !

tags: mac openoffice.org porting