OpenOffice.org developers conference - OOoCon 2006

Two weeks ago, the annual OpenOffice.org conference (OOoCon 2006) took place in Lyon [0]. It was a fantastic event were most of the developers working on OOo could meet face to face. If you missed the event you can download all the videos of the presentations from the kiberpipa website [1]. There, Björn and I presented the chart2 module [2]. Thanks again to the french community for organizing the conference. PS : during the event, I had interresting chats with Jürgen Schmidt (OOo extensions), Joerg sievers (the specification team), Kay Backman (speed OOo compilation) , Björn Milcke (chart module), Thorsten Behrens (XCanvas) and wanted to thanks them for there work. [0] http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2006/index.html [1] http://ooocon-arnes.kiberpipa.org/ [2] http://blogs.sun.com/bmilcke/date/20060919

Chart Module : Björn Milcke's blog

Good news, Björn started writing a blog [0]. Welcome Björn to Planet.go-oo.org ;-) For those that do not know him, Björn is one of the main developer of the new chart module (the second being Ingrid Halama). Hence having his blog referenced on planet OpenOffice is great : it may be a good source of information for those interrested in Chart2. Let's hope that it may give Ingrid some motivation to write her own ;-) [0] http://blogs.sun.com/bmilcke/

Chart Module : first press article

Last week the first article [0] on the new chart module was published on the Linux Journal website. This is a review of the current state of the new chart module and the improvements already implemented. Nice to read the writer's point of view : [0] http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000090 PS : also read Björn's comment which adds some more info

Chart Module : new preview released (m8)

In order to the improve OOo experience, a new chart module is under development. A new preview version is released approximately once a month. This month the milestone 8 was released. You can download it from the following website. : http://graphics.openoffice.org/chart/chart.html It is aimed at testers so please do not hesitate to give feedbacks, we are really taking them into account. So if you have ideas about features you would like to see in it, just do it : submit issues ;-)

Antidote - French grammar checker for OOo and Linux

That's a great news for French OpenOffice.org and Linux users : There is now a french grammar checker working with OpenOffice.org on both Linux and Windows. That's really a great news for many organizations and governments in France as a few of them where lacking such a tool. Thanks to Druide [0] for trusting in such markets ! PS : Again a great tool developed with Qt from Trolltech [1] [0] http://www.druide.com/ [1] http://trolltech.com/

Chart2 - Hamburg round trip

During summer (15 to 20 of August), I had the opportunity to go to Sun's office in Hamburg to work on the chart module. There, I met Ingrid (iha) and Björn (bm_), the two main developers of the new chart module at Sun and many other OOo developers. It was really a great time and I have so many "souvenirs" that I could feed a bunch of blog entries with them. I really wanted to thanks CUSOON for sponsoring the trip and all the people at Sun where I was welcomed so nicely. On the other side, during those three working days, we spend our time mostly on two topics :

• The OOoCon 2006 presentation on the new chart module [0]
• Implementing a new small functionality for the chart module : x-sorting for XY charts

The more interresting part that I learned are some insight in the OOo development and especially the dialog development. I will share those things in one of my next posts, thus, stay tuned. [0] http://blogs.sun.com/bmilcke/entry/ooocon_2006_chart_talk_resources

Dialog Dump - Ease the creation of new dialogs

Had a few weeks of blog delay due to holydays and workload. Now I can just take some time to post what has happened during the last weeks. The first news is a new extension for the core OOo developers called dialog dump. This can just save hours of code, it is then a great news. Here is just the quote from Robert Vojta's blog [0]:

If you want to develop a new dialog to the OpenOffice.org suite, you have to learn how to work with .src, .hrc, .cxx and .hxx files. It's a little bit complex work even if you want to create a very simple dialog with few controls.

Frank Schönheit @ Sun introduces new Dialog Dump tool. It's very simple, it works and it rocks!

• Subject: introducing DialogDump
• Dialog Dump wiki page

Note - This is for OpenOffice.org developers, not for extensions developers! If you are an extension developer, read Chapter 11 from the OpenOffice.org Developer's Guide.

[0] http://blog.vojta.name/archives/2006/09/02/T12_20_09/