Wednesday October 22, 2008

Java 6 Update 10 arrived - now officially!

Java SE 6 Update 10 is more than a normal update, it brings a lot of improvements: Faster, smaller, better Direct3D support, Next Generation Java Plug-in,  ...

And FWIK, future updates (on Windows) will really update the current JRE, instead of installing the new release next to the old release.

For more details, see the release notes.

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Oct 22 2008, 09:52:14 AM CEST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Tuesday October 21, 2008

Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin

I am just attending the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin.

After more than 17 years of mainly C++ software development, I thought this would be a good opportunity to get more in touch with all this Web 2.0 technologies and products.

I just enjoyed the keynote (which was held AFTER the workshops) from Tim O'Reilly.

After that, six start ups had the opportunity to talk about their new products.

One of them was aka-aki. This is an interesting product, I think. Nothing I would need personally, but I am sure kiddies, teens and students will love it.

It's also interesting from the technology standpoint of view - can use blue tooth, GPS and/or GSM cell information for phone/friend detection.

Aka-aki will launch tomorrow here in Germany, this fall internationally.

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Oct 21 2008, 06:28:24 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [0]

3000000x3

OpenOffice.org version 3 is available for 1 week now, and was already downloaded more than 3 million times!

And this is only what we can count - it doesn't include torrents and other ways of distributions.

More information and links in this blog.

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Oct 21 2008, 11:16:56 AM CEST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Friday October 17, 2008

Open Source Accessibility Funding

Working on open source accessibility for more than 7 years now, I am happy to see that the AEGIS project will invest €12.6m into accessibility, with the vast majority of it focused on open source solutions.

Leading our OpenOffice.org accessibility efforts since 2001, I can tell you how difficult it can be to convince people to spend time and resource to work on accessibility related stuff "under the hood", since probably more than 99% of the users won't recognize anything from it.

Now with the AEGIS funding, I am sure a lot of wonderful things in the area of accessibility can be achieved in different projects.

More details about the AEGIS project can be found in Peter Korn's blog, where you can also find some details about Sun's accessibility efforts...

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Oct 17 2008, 09:10:35 AM CEST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Thursday October 16, 2008

Review of OpenOffice.org 3

You might be interested in the Computerworld's review of OpenOffice.org 3.

"...Given that the full suite is free, this is one of the best deals you'll find in all of computing. It'll do just about anything you expect from an office suite..."

Just one point I would like to clarify: The statement "... It won't, however, work with the newest Office 2007 formats such as .docx..." is not 100% correct. You cannot save as docx, but you can open docx files.

So this gives you the ability to salvage all the documents you created with your pre-installed MS Office 2007 trial version, which only stored your documents in this format and you don't know how to open them now w/o buying MS Office ;)

Beside the review itself,  the blog has many users comments worth reading...

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Oct 16 2008, 10:23:23 AM CEST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Monday October 13, 2008

OpenOffice.org 3 is there... somewhere!

Well, when you try to get it from the official site (www.openoffice.org) NOW, you probably won't see it because too many people are trying to get it now.

But it's there, and the new release comes with many new exciting features.

The biggest addition probably is the native support for Mac OSX, but there are also many other great new features like a PDF import, import of Office 2007 documents, a multi page view in Writer, native tables in Impress, a Solver in Calc, and much more...

When the web site is fully back to live, you should find a feature guide here. 

So the new version is absolutely worth updating your old installation, or finally start using OpenOffice.org at all.

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Oct 13 2008, 08:07:45 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [2]

Thursday October 02, 2008

odt2dtbook - a DAISY export extension for OpenOffice.org

If you are interested in DAISY export, this extension for OpenOffice.org might be your friend. 

Vincent Spiewak and Dominique Archambault won Gold for their work on this extension, as part of the Innovation in Open Source Community Award Program.

Congratulations! :)

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Oct 02 2008, 07:25:59 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [0]