Monday November 17, 2008

StarOffice 9 arrived

Finally, StarOffice 9 is available.

Basically it's almost the same as the recently released OpenOffice.org 3.0.

The most important differences are indemnification, and up to 3 warranty support calls included in the retail version. Some people also like our hotfixes and patches that we provide for StarOffice only, while you always have to do full installations for new OOo releases.

It's really up to you whether you want to use StarOffice or OpenOffice.org - in the end we are happy to offer different levels of services contracts for both products.

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Nov 17 2008, 07:11:20 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [2]

Thursday November 13, 2008

odt2dtbook 1.0.1

There is a new and improved version of the odt2dtbook extension for OpenOffice.org available!

For details about the changes, I suggest reading Dominique's blog, since he is one of the authors of that extension...

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Nov 13 2008, 05:39:04 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [0]

Tuesday November 11, 2008

IAccessible2, or - IBM to contribute to the OpenOffice.org 3 code line!

This was one of my personal highlights in the keynotes from the 6th OpenOffice.org conference last week:

In his talk, Michael Karasick, Director of Lotus Development IBM China, has promised that IBM would eventually contribute to the OOo 3 code line. And he especially mentioned IAccessible2.

So I hope to see this happening soon, volunteering to work together with the Team from IBM on this.

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Nov 11 2008, 10:43:32 AM CET ) Permalink Comments [0]

Saturday November 08, 2008

Traffic in Beijing

Seems I must revise what I wrote about the traffic here a few days ago - traffic is still very heavy, seems I just watched it the wrong times or places when thinking it would be better nowadays.

Today we have been on a tourists tour with around 100 participants from OOoCon, and the ride within the city took very long.

We have been to different placces, including the Great Wall. There we had the "pleasure" to have the first snow of this year...

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Nov 08 2008, 03:16:17 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [0]

Wednesday November 05, 2008

odftoolkit.org

Just a quick note: Some of you might know that we have the ODF Toolkit project on OpenOffice.org for some time now.

Well, since something like an ODF toolkit should be independend from OOo, Sun and IBM just announced today at the OOoCon 2008 the ODF Toolkit project on odftoolkit.org (Press release will come some time later). This way, people can contribut to ODF w/o needing to contribute to OOo, and we use the very liberal Apache license.

In the beginning it will start with what we had on the OOo site, and the hosting system is Sun's Kenai.

I am sure many exciting things around ODF will be developed there quite soon...

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Nov 05 2008, 05:59:29 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [0]

China again

I am just attending the 6^th OpenOffice.org conference in Beijing.

It's more more than a year ago that I visited RedFlag 2000 to teach them different things from OOo architecture, and some things in Beijing changed meanwhile, mostly because of the Olympic games.

There are many more subway lines, and the new ones are really modern.

Interesting that you have to put your luggage into some X-Ray machine when you enter the train system. I guess they started it for Olympics games, and didn't give up afterwards.

I have the feeling that the traffic situation has improved. People are still driving like crazy, and as a pedestrian you better be very careful, but it seems there are less cars – people probably prefer the train now, which is fast and really cheap (~ EUR 0,25 for a one way ticket, distance doesn't matter).

I will stay here until the week end, because we will have some guided tourists tours then. I have seen most places on my last trip, but: Last time I was here on my own. This time, I am here with 35 colleagues! This will be fun, and I tend to compare it with a “school trip”.

More to come...

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Nov 05 2008, 05:46:25 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [2]