OpenOffice improvement: Fixed highscorer Crashes

Often, people wonder which exciting features comes with the new OOo version and if they should I update to this new version? It is not always easy to answer. Often, only a few new features are visible to users while big changes happened in the code. That's why this article posted by Thorsten Ziehm on Gulffoss is really interresting. Some data for OpenOffice.org 2.1.0 What striked me the most is the number of "Fixed highscorer Crashes". You can see that more than 300 crashes of OpenOffice.org have been corrected since OOo 2.0.0. That's really great as it shows that developpers in the "background" are doing an amazing work, even if most users don't see the result first when they launch a new OOo version.

Chart Module : integration candidate 1 (m10)

A new preview release of the new chart module was delivered yesterday, just before christmas. Nice present, isn't it? Here are the interresting links:

• Download the new module
• What's new in the new chart?
• What's new in milestone 10?
• How to help testing and reporting issues?
• Installation notes

Help needed: If you want to help too improve the new chart module, here are some things you can do:

• testing the milestone 10 and declaring issues
• Writing a nice web page on the wiki showcasing the new chart module (showing new features with screenshots and a nice layout...). Once you wrote the page, just drop a mail to the chart team.

Thanks: We would like to thanks the persons that helped in testing this new chart module to achieve a bug-free release. We would like to encourage everybody to continue hunting bugs as this is really important to improve the quality of the product.

Need help : choosing a default color palette for charts

As you may know, a new chart module is being developped. One of the more visible issue with chart are its colors. You can see Issue 7019. Hence, help is needed to choose colors which would look better. That's an interresting task for anyone wanting to help with OOo as no-programming knowledge is required. Before you start working, here are the requirements your palette has to fulfill :

1. There are 12 colors needed.
2. They should be suiteable for thin lines as well as filled areas.
3. They should be distinguishable on black and white printers as well.
4. They should be suitable for 2D and 3D charts.

Once you found something, you can post the references of the colors on the issue. If you have any question, you can come to the IRC channel on freenode : #chart2.openoffice.org.

Tips related to colors :

• For adding colors to the palette that are not by default in OOo : Tools > Option... > OpenOffice.org > Colors
• for changing default colors of a newly created chart : Tools > Option... > Chart > Default Colors

[Usability] Developer-designed UIs

While reading a post from Celeste Paul on planet-kde, I followed an interresting link about UI design. I would say that my favorite "dialog" in OOo is this one : "File > New > Labels"

Automagically update to IE7.0...

Interresting to see that the microsoft update installer just propose to anybody with a Windows XP SP2 to switch to IE7.0 while installing security updates... A nice way to make some "free" advertisement for the new browser.