A free software developer adventure

Designing Qt-Style C++ APIs

2007-10-08T23:01:00.000+02:00

I just found an article worth reading on designing good C++ APIs: http://doc.trolltech.com/qq/qq13-apis.html Here are the main topics:

A File Format Timeline

2007-09-20T18:49:00.000+02:00

Here is an interresting retrospective from Rob Weir on microsoft way of thinking file formats. There is a very nice chart and not so much text to read (exactly what I need at 7 pm) : http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/06/file-format-timeline.html A quote :

My guess is that OOXML is merely a transitional format, much like Windows ME was in the OS space, a temporary hybrid used to ease the transition from 16-bit to the 32-bit platform that would eventually come (Windows 2000). Microsoft doesn't want to support all of the quirks of their legacy formats forever. That just leads to bloated, fragile code, more expensive development and support costs. They would rather have clean, structured markup, like ODF. But the question is, how do you get there? The answer is straightforward: First, eliminate the competition. Second, move users in small steps, promising the comfort of continuity and safety. Third, once you have eliminated competition and have the users on the OOXML format that no one but Microsoft fully understands, then you may have your will of them. For example, introduce a new format that drops support for legacy formats and force everyone to upgrade. They are pretty much doing this already on the Mac by dropping support for VBA in the next version of the Mac Office.

Offline GMail, Gmail tags and Thunderbird 2

2007-09-08T10:48:00.000+02:00

[SPOILER] As this post is quite long, here are the main ideas : (1) create a thunderbird extension to grab GMail tags, (2) standardize the way MUA (GMail, Thunderbird, Zimbra...) share mail tags with each other.

From time to time, I dream of an offline GMail & GCalendar. Those two applications are really nice but lack of an offline mode, which makes them unsuitable for travelling. As I use GMail & GCalendar to implement GTD [1], those two applications are cruical to my daily work. Not being able to access them is really a pain.

Offline Gmail & GCalendar? Yes, I am quite sure that this dream will come true some time in the future as Google announced Gears [2] a few month ago. For thus of you who missed it, Gears is a framework for making web applications work offline. Currently, Gears allows Google Reader users to check RSS feeds offline. Thus, we can easily suppose that GMail and GCalendar will be supported. But before this comes true, I have to find an offline solution.

The offline calendar issue was solved with Thunderbird, lightning and GCalDaemon [3]. This allows me to have access to my Calendar, to modify it and to synchronise everything back once I get an internet connection. It works really nicely.

For the GMail synchronisation, I can use POP to download the content of the mails, but I lose a highly critical part of the mail information: the tags. As each mail in my inbox is categorized with several tags (cf GTD) I can't possibly imagine to apply manually the tags for each mail twice. That would be a complete waste of time. It is also not possible to create filters/rules to automatically because the tags applied to a mail change over the time but not the content of the mail.

As a matter of fact, more and more Mail clients support tagging. For example, GMail, Zimbra [4] and Thunderbird support it. My first question is thus: would it be possible to improve the mail protocols (IMAP, POP) to support new features like tagging or flagging? If anyone has an answer, I would be eager to know it, but as always will well established standards, it would take year before we could see the result in daily used apps.

In the meantime, what I would like to see is a Thunderbird extension to synchronise tags between GMail/Zimbra and Thunderbid. Does anyone knows if such an extension exists? If it does not exists, I think I will try to spend some time working on it. The major issue I currently think of is: Does Google allows access to such an API? Any clue is welcome.

PS 1: BTW, if you don't know GTD, you should really read that book, it might change the way you work.

PS 2: Zimbra already provides a beta of an offline mode.

[1] GTD With GMail
[2] Google Gears
[3] Gmail and Offline Calendar

Gmail and Offline Calendar

2007-09-02T23:37:00.000+02:00

Since a few years, I have been using GCalendar for managing appointements. It is really a nice tool providing all the features I need (email alarms, ical sync...) : http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/overview.html The only real issue I had with it was to access to my appointements offline. As I regularly spent weeks abroad without any internet connection it was really a pain. Thus, I needed to print on PDF the next weeks in order to access to my schedule which is not that nice. Tonight, I finally found a solution, GCalDaemon: http://gcaldaemon.sourceforge.net/index.html And an introduction to using it: http://lifehacker.com/software/google-calendar/geek-to-live--sync-google-calendar-and-gmail-contacts-to-your-desktop-251279.php I can now synchronise all my calendars using Thunderbird and Lightning. This is a real improvement to my way of working.

FUD - StarOffice in the Google Pack

2007-08-25T21:27:00.000+02:00

I suppose that most of you already know about the Google Pack now including StarOffice. Recently, I read an article about it on Eweek. Here is what you could see: Isn't it nice to see how to scare potential users with a few sentences?

Firefox - First Enterprise Working Group

2007-07-26T10:09:00.000+02:00

Here is an interresting post entry. It deals with all the companies' needs in order to ease the deployment of Firefox. I think that many aspects are the same for deploying OOo in companies.

An explanation of the Firefox Enterprise Working Group (EWG) :

As I mentioned earlier, we now have an Enterprise Working Group that is exploring how we can make Firefox easier to use/deploy for large organizations (companies, schools, governments, universities).

A quotation of the issues companies have:

Very Brief Summary The theme of this meeting was "Experience". Folks on the call shared their personal experience with Firefox in an enterprise environment. There were clear areas of interest and overlap. My main take-away has been this: It cannot be understated nor unappreciated that "Enterprises" do, in fact, share pain-points and challenges and therefore must come together to form a real, effective Community. Some identified synergies By no means a completed list, but here is what jumped out at me:
Packaging.
Story around MSIs and MSTs vs some open source formats. Most Enterprises are heavy Windows users. At what point does the lack of these hinder adoption?
What is feasible? What can Mozilla own and what can and should the Enterprise Community own?
Patch Management.
If an organization is not very Agile and agility assumes that not everything is perfect out of the box, is Mozilla's patch cycle too agile for "enterprises"?
How are others patching Firefox on desktops without having to uninstall and install the entire product?
Settings Management.
What are some trade-offs between GPO and Mission Control?
Not all settings are manageable.
What settings should be exposed by all extensions to enable pref-level lockdown?
Can we drive best practices for deploying plugins and extensions? There is very little documentation on where Plugins should go and how to configure in the registry.
How do we prevent some critical settings from being "tattooed" into prefs.js? I.e. mcontrol and user agent settings should never be written to prefs.js when in Enterprise mode.
User Profiles
How can profiles/certificates be migrated with minimum impact to the end-users?
Does having Firefox and IE share bookmarks help adoption? Can Firefox "piggy-back" on Favorites? How can it be done easily?

The links: http://jtbatson.blogspot.com/2007/07/first-enterprise-working-group-call.html http://e2pt0.blogspot.com/2007/07/firefox-ewgs-first-call-is-success.html

Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office 1.0

2007-07-04T09:12:00.000+02:00

Did you heard of ODF? In short, it is the format used to store OpenOffice.org documents and it is standardized as an ISO format.

Yesterday, Sun just released the version 1.0 of his ODF plugin for Microsoft Office. This is a great news, it means that if you install this plugin, you will be able to open/save ODF files from Microsoft Office.

This works with Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Supported versions are Microsoft Office 2000, XP and 2003.

Congratulation to Sun.

"Small Tour through the New Chart"

2007-06-05T16:19:00.000+02:00

Bjoern Milcke just pointed a nice article showcasing the new chart module: The new OpenOffice.org Charting Tool Coming in OpenOffice.org 2.3 from Solveig Haugland from GetOpenOffice.org

Nice to see the new chart getting some attention.

XNote for Thunderbird 2.0

2007-05-29T17:07:00.000+02:00

XNote for Thunderbird 2.0 was just released. Beware that this version is imcompatible with Thunderbird 1.5. This version was sponsored by the company I work for called StarXpert (http://www.starxpert.fr).

If you are interrested in it, you can just download it from:
https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/thunderbird/addon/3093

or from:
http://starxpert.fr/outils/XNote/

I also post a screenshot where you can have a look at a note:

New chart integrated into Milestone 213

2007-05-25T15:28:00.000+02:00

The new chart module was just integrated into Milestone 213 (a developper release). What a great news! You should really test it. You should also check this post and the the screenshot on it, it looks fantastic:
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/new_chart_module_is_integrated

Here is the mail send by Ingrid Halama on the chart mailing lists:

Hi chart users, The chart module is renewed completely starting with SRC680_m213 and integration of CWS chart2mst3. This is the basis for further enhancements and long awaited features.

Get a quick overview of contained improvements here:
http://graphics.openoffice.org/chart/whatsnewinchart2.html

You are welcome to download the latest developer snapshot containing the new chart for evaluation and testing purposes:
http://download.openoffice.org/SRC680/index.html

Many thanks to all of you who worked to make this happen! A lot of people also outside Sun helped with testing the preview versions, writing help texts or specifications:
Regina Henschel, Tony Galmiche, Pierre-Andre Galmes, Jörg Wartenberg and many others.

Thanks a lot for your help!
Ingrid

For more information visit the chart website: http://graphics.openoffice.org/chart/chart.html

XSLT and memory consumption

2007-05-24T17:45:00.000+02:00

Today, Svante Schubert pointed to me an interresting article about an algorithm than allows XSLT to consume less memory:
http://www.topxml.com/xsl/articles/recurse/
This is nice as this issue has been very annoying to me since quite some time. Maybe it can also help other developers.

Code reviews and the NetBeans Collaboration Project

2007-05-24T07:56:00.000+02:00

As the idea of code review is making its way into OpenOffice.org Martin Hollmichel send links regarding codu review tools. I did discover that Netbeans offers such capabilities. If you are interrested, you should check the following flash video:
The flash video

Other links:
the NetBeans Collaboration Project: http://collab.netbeans.org/
Another nice article: A review

A new report designer for OpenOffice.og Base

2007-04-19T19:26:00.000+02:00

I just read a really good news. It semms that a long awaited Report designer for OOo Base is becoming real! You should check the screenshot: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/report_designer_will_extend_the Thanks Ocke for letting us know about it.

OOo Google Summer of Code 2007

2007-04-12T13:52:00.000+02:00

Google announced today the accepted projects : http://code.google.com/soc/ooo/about.html
Good luck to all students and mentors.

[UX] expanding the desktop experience: sticky Windows

2007-04-11T16:58:00.000+02:00

Just watch the video and enjoy: http://www.donelleschi.com/stickywindows/

Working towards a unified text layout engine for the free desktop software stack

2007-03-30T17:29:00.000+02:00

I just read about another interresting initiative that aims at " providing a single place in the free desktop software stack to add support for new complex languages and provide consistent behavior across applications when it comes to text shaping." If it work, it could help to avoid a lot of duplicate development, but I don't know if it could be easily integrated to OOo. Any thought?

[UX] OpenICC: Color management for OpenSource

2007-03-15T17:19:00.000+01:00

I just read about an interresting intiative from freedesktop called OpenICC:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/OpenIcc

Here is what this project is aimed at:

OpenICC has two main goals. The first goal is to work out a common set of settings for color savvy applications to share profiles and settings. The second goal is to bring together those developers in areas like printing, display and desktop applications to work together to make color management end to end work for open source applications.

As the OOo User Experience (UX) Team has been working on colors lately (new chart colors...), this might be an interresting thing to have a look at.

How do features get into OOo? Ideas for improvements

2007-03-12T13:46:00.000+01:00

A few days ago, I posted an entry regarding the priorities for features implementation or in other words "why is a this feature implemented and that one is not". At that time, there were no answers for such a question.

Since that blog entry, Mathias Bauer wrote in GullFOSS an article called "Why all issues are equal but some are more equal than others". I suppose that his blog entry could even be pasted on some page on the wiki in order to keep it somewhere.

Thanks to Mathias, we now have more visibility on the "variables" used to choose which features to implement next. That's a good point.

In order to improve the visibility of the choice, a few more things may be achieved. The aim would be to have a page representing a scoring system, were the issues on the top would be the next ones to be implemented. Currently this is not the case as the scoring system only shows votes. And as Mathias explained it, votes are only one variable between others, thus the issues with the highest number of votes are not necessarily the next ones to be implemented.

The aim of the improvement would be that the "score" would be the reference for the next features to be implemented. So this score should be a sum including variables like:

complexity of implementation,
gain for users,
a developper wants to work on it,
customers are paying for it,
...

Those variables would then need to be added to IssueZilla and the scoring would be a result of a computation including the variables. What do you think?

Note: Those variables would also be useful for other purpose like selecting which issues could be assigned to new developpers (the one with low complexity).

Cairo 1.4.0 is out

2007-03-07T12:00:00.000+01:00

Cairo 1.4.0 was just released. That's again a good news, as this version comes with huge improvements, especialy regarding performances which were the major complain about Cairo and improvements in PDF support. Here is the link: http://cairographics.org/news/cairo-1.4.0

As Cairo is used in Firefox and is making its way into OOo with Cairo Canvas, this is an interresting news also for the OpenOffice.org community. Especially regarding Impress, Draw, and calc charts. If I understood well, cairo canvas are the one which should bring anti-aliasing for OOo. I am really eager to see those included!

PS: Maybe Thorsten has some news about those things.

Firefox 3.0 new extension feature

2007-03-06T12:46:00.000+01:00

I just read the requirements for firefox 3.0: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3/Firefox_Requirements

And what stroke me are the "P1" issues about Firefox. Many of them are about improving Add-ons. I just copied a fiew of them in this blog entry:

Improve Add-On install experience
- FR: Add-On can be installed in fewer than 3 mouse clicks
- NFR: simplify XPI Install dialogs and user interactions
- NFR: simplify user interaction with whitelist

Improve Add-On configuration experience
- FR: allow Add-On configuration UI to be accessed from main application configuration UI
- NFR: improve discoverability of Add-On configuration UI

Improve Add-On management experience
- FR: add visual indication when Add-On Updates are present to browser UI
- FR: add permanent button for restarting firefox
- FR: expose all hidden functionality such as "Find Update"
- NFR: improve usability of Add-On Manager
- NFR: simplify language and unify terminology

Which one do you think could also be implemented in OOo?

How do features get into OpenOffice.org?

2007-03-01T13:26:00.000+01:00

I just read an interresting article about how Zimbra manages new features to be added: http://www.zimbra.com/blog/archives/2007/02/open_source_pro.html

Does someone knows if there is a document explaining how things are managed for OOo? I am sure that many issue reporters complaining that there issue is critical would love to know more about it ;-)

chart module: Vote for the new default colors

2007-02-21T17:18:00.000+01:00

Do you want to see the default chart colors changed? So, please, just go to that page and vote: http://ui.openoffice.org/VisualDesign/OOoChart_colors_drafts.html

Chart Module : integration candidate 2 (m11)

2007-02-21T17:09:00.000+01:00

A new preview release of the new chart module was delivered today. Here are the interresting links:

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

testing the milestone 11 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...). As the integration is approaching, having marketing material becomes critical. Here is the current page which can be improved.

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.

Mono brings Visual Basic programs to Linux

2007-02-21T13:42:00.000+01:00

After the agreement between Sun and Novell to support VBA in OpenOffice.org, The Mono Projects announced a that it now features a VB compiler: http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3057967810.html

Will OOo have its own VSTOOo (Visual Studio Tools for OpenOffice.org) so that we can develop using the .Net framework ;-)

[QA] Linux Desktop Testing Project (LDTP) 0.8 is out

2007-02-15T13:56:00.000+01:00

Again a good news: the new release of LDTP is ready. LDTP is a functionnal testing environment, meaning that you can reproduce users clicks on your UI. In case you don't know about it yet, you should have a look at their website: http://ldtp.freedesktop.org/ And for the Sun guys, a demo of the scenario recorder using Netbeans: http://people.freedesktop.org/~nagappan/ldtpguidemo.html

"Sun and Novell work together on a common OpenOffice.org VBA story"

2007-02-12T15:07:00.000+01:00

What a great news! Finally, Novell and Sun join effort to improve VBA support in OpenOffice.org! That's what I just read from Jürgen Schmidt blog entry:

http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/sun_and_novell_work_together

That means that in the future, even Ms Office documents with macro will be imported in OpenOffice.org. Fantastic!

OpenOffice.org Calc Tips : Scaling prints

2007-02-06T21:21:00.000+01:00

Here is an interresting use case. I have the following set of data: many lines and a few columns. You can have an idea of how the data looks in the screenshot (data range : A1:L159): What I want to do is to print all the columns on the same sheet and I don't care of the number sheets for the lines. How would you do that? Any hint? Currently, I see two way to do it.

The first one, is quite an easy one: use the "Page break preview". Select "View > Page break Preview". You should see something similar to the screenshot: Then, just click on the vertical blue line showing the end of "page 1" and drag it to the end of your data. And that's it.

The second method is not that easy to find. It does use the page formating dialog. Select Format > Page... and click on the sheet page. You should see something similar to this screenshot. In the "Scale" area, select "Fit print range(s) to width/heigth" and then just click on the hegth text box and remove the "1". It should look like the screenshot now: Then just click on the "Ok" button. By removing the "1", you explain to OOo that it has to take care of the number of pages for the heigth. To check the result, just have a look at the print preview.

PS: I agree, that having a value called "*", "I don't care" or anything else could make this easier for users. Maybe an issue should be reported about that ?

OpenOffice improvement: Fixed highscorer Crashes

2006-12-29T14:04:00.000+01:00

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)

2006-12-22T15:40:00.000+01:00

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:

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.

Need help : choosing a default color palette for charts

2006-12-08T13:48:00.000+01:00

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 :

There are 12 colors needed.
They should be suiteable for thin lines as well as filled areas.
They should be distinguishable on black and white printers as well.
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

2006-12-07T14:08:00.000+01:00

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...

2006-12-05T20:26:00.000+01:00

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.

Chart Module : beta released (m9)

2006-11-03T17:56:00.000+01:00

A new preview release of the new chart module has been released. This time we are looking for testers to hunt bugs. If you have some free time, you can help making OOo better. Here is what Ingrid (iha) posted about this new release :

A beta developer snapshot of the ongoing chart reimplementation is available for download on the chart website. I would like to encourage you to help with testing thus we can assure to not introduce severe regression when replacing the old chart. Just download, extract and start. As this is a developer snapshot build it should not conflict with your normal OpenOffice.org version on your computer. Be aware that the current build still contains a lot of bugs, missing features and maybe incompatibilities. So please don't use it for regular work. Your help and feedback is very appreciated!

The links : - What's new in this milestone - Testable areas - Installation hints

Usability : User Experience team

2006-10-31T14:08:00.000+01:00

In my last post on Usability I was wondering if there was a Usability community in the OpenOffice.org project. I was nicely surprised to find a comment from Lutz Höger. Here is what he answered :

Sun's User Experience team is in transition towards becoming part of or founding an OOo User Experience team. Though there are already some contributions from this area available, like our work in specifications [0], OOo UI guidelines [1], and our work in countless single issues, it still is a long way to go until we can speak of a true OOo UX community. For the time being, our wiki page [2] may serve as a starting point, and you are invited to join us and help us shaping this community. Best regards! Lutz

So if anybody is interrested in helping, I am sure that the User Experience Team will welcome you. PS : Thanks to the User Experience Team for doing such a work.

[0] The specification project

[1] User Interface Guidelines

[2] User Experience Wiki

BasKet 0.6.0 : a software for taking notes

2006-10-31T13:48:00.000+01:00

I just wanted to point out that the Basket team just released a new version of its software. Basket is a software for taking notes which has upon many others the qualities of being easy to use, good looking and integrated into Kontact (the KDE PIM). You can get more info about it at the following website :

http://basket.kde.org/

Ready to use Sun's data centers

2006-10-26T14:35:00.000+02:00

I love the new marketing compaign for the Sun's blackbox datacenter. Have a look at the following link : http://www.sun.com/emrkt/blackbox/scenarios.jsp

Nice, isn't it.

Usability collaboration in OpenOffice.org

2006-10-19T08:41:00.000+02:00

I just read an article by a member of the KDE community on "Usability collaboration in OSS" [0]. In this article he explains the key factors to make the "usability community" of a given project achieve its goals. The goals of such a community are explained by it definition :

"Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal"

From that definition, we can imagine that usability is a key feature of the success of a software, as it is directly related to users. I wonder, do we have in OOo a usability community? That may be useful to achieve the goals of making the software easy to use.

[0] http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2462

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability

OpenOffice.org extensions : deploying templates, autotexts...

2006-10-16T20:30:00.000+02:00

During its presentation about extensions [0], Jürgen Schmidt showcased the new extensions related features in OOo 2.0.4. One of those features is being able to deploy "non-code extensions", that means that you can deploy templates, autotext or images in packages. Here is the introduction from the links below [1] :

The OpenOffice.org extension deployment concept based on UNO packages is not limited to code, it also allows to install other things like templates, autotexts etc. in handy packages. Here's a short explanation how this basically works. It is targeted to advanced end users, administrators and development newbies.

[0]the conference : http://ooocon-arnes.kiberpipa.org/media/index-day2-2006.html
[1]the explanations : http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Non-code_extensions

Beta-Blogger & Planet.go-oo : RSS feed required

2006-10-16T15:04:00.000+02:00

For those considering to switch to the new beta-blogger, please before doing so, contact martin kretzschmar (martink on IRC). The Atom feed seems not to be well interpreted by planet.go-oo hence martin will change to the RSS feed. You can also have a look at the following post from Ain Vagula : http://vagula.blogspot.com/2006/10/broken-linebreaks-from-blogger-beta.html

"Creating passionate users"

2006-10-08T22:45:00.000+02:00

I recently started reading the Katy Sierra's blog following Kai Backman's advice and I have to say that I love it. There you can find books to "make the world better", the "Zombie function" and many interresting posts about users behaviour. Thanks Kai for letting me know it ;-) http://headrush.typepad.com/

New QT 4.2 release

2006-10-04T17:31:00.000+02:00

What a great news : Qt 4.2 has been released. As always, this release brings a bunch of brand new features [2]. Check out the what’s new document. The features I love :

UI with Styles (equivalent to CSS for the web) [0]
the Graphic View [1]
Undo Framework (cool to have it already implemented in a generic way)

You can also watch the video with some code demo [3]. Definitly, QT rocks !

OpenOffice.org developers conference - OOoCon 2006

2006-09-24T23:54:00.000+02:00

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

2006-09-24T21:50:00.000+02:00

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

2006-09-24T21:37:00.000+02:00

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)

2006-09-24T21:31:00.000+02:00

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

2006-09-19T19:21:00.000+02:00

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

2006-09-19T18:35:00.000+02:00

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

2006-09-19T18:20:00.000+02:00

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/

Functional Testing for Linux : LDTP 0.5 is out

2006-08-20T22:37:00.000+02:00

I just received an interresting announce for those involved in Testing and Software Quality. A new version of LDTP [0] was published during the last week. About LDTP :

"Linux Desktop Testing Project is aimed at producing high quality test automation framework and cutting-edge tools that can be used to test Linux Desktop and improve it. It uses the Accessibility libraries to poke through the application's user interface. The framework also has tools to record test-cases based on user events in the interface of the application which is under testing. We strive to help in building a quality desktop."

For those not knowing much about testing (and I am one of those), during last years, while testing software there are many ways to do things. Two of the well known concepts are Unit Testing and Functional Testing. Unit Testing : you test each function individualy to ensure that it behaves as expected. For example, for the square function f(x) = square(x), you test that for all kind of "x" values the returned number is right. Here is in principle how unit testing can be done :

// Testing values x = 0; result = 0; x = 1; result = 1; x = -1; result = 1; [...] // the square function. int foo( int x ){ return x*x } // The tests if ( foo(x) != result){ print "This test failed." }

Functional Testing : you test user functionalities in particular that the software behaves as expected. For example, "Test that when the user click on the "connect to server" button, the connection to the server is established correctly". As you may imagine this can save hours of testings done manually. Functional Testing and Unit Testings are important to improve the quality of software, thus software developers should consider using them and the LDTP seems to be a promising project. [0] http://ldtp.freedesktop.org/wiki/

Discovering new OOo 2.0.4 Features

2006-08-11T19:27:00.000+02:00

I would like to point that wiki page [0] and thanks its writers. This page describes the brand new features to come with OpenOffice.org 2.0.4. As always I love having a look at new features ! It reminds us that if a feature is not yet included in OpenOffice.org, you can just create a RFE (called issue in the tracker system) and wait for it to get included or even better, you can add the feature by your own ! Isn't it a wonderful sensation of power ? ;-) "Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?" "The same thing we do every night, Pinky: Try to take over the world!" [0]http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Feature_Freeze_Testing_204

OpenOffice.org MacOS Porting on its way !

2006-08-11T10:58:00.000+02:00

Pavel just posted a couple of screenshots of the state of the OpenOffice.org port to MacOS : http://blog.janik.cz/images/MacOSX/2006-08-10/ Thanks again to the MacOS port team for their work. PS: Do not worry about the widgets not looking like in Aqua. This will come soon.

"Microsoft strips Office for Mac"

2006-08-10T17:22:00.000+02:00

Just read an interresting blog entry [0]:

"According to eWeek [1] MS is not supporting VB for Office Macros on the Mac in the next Office for Mac version. That means cross platform compatibility between Office versions will be more difficult to come by."

This might be a real opportunity for OpenOffice.org and StarOffice to gain more market shares by keeping macro Compatibility. And what if compatibility of macros would be kept accross software and platform [3] (like this is done with ODF for documents) ? [0]http://conficio.blogspot.com/2006/08/microsoft-strips-office-for-mac.html [1] http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2000434,00.asp [2] http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/08/08/1232239 [3] http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2006/05/case-for-python.html

XNote : Some news

2006-08-01T15:28:00.000+02:00

After my last post on XNote, Björn Milcke did a translation of the Thunderbird extension in English and German. So if you are interrested in it, you can just download it from: http://starxpert.fr/staroffice/ressources.htm#xnote or directly from: http://starxpert.fr/outils/XNote/ I also post a screenshot where you can have a look at a note:

Xnote : adding notes to messages in thunderbird

2006-07-25T21:20:00.000+02:00

Some weeks ago, we (StarXpert) released a new Add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird called Xnote. This Add-on allows adding notes to a message. For example, if you have specific infos about a mail but would like to answer to it later, you can just store the infos directy with the mail by adding a note. Features :

Add notes to messages
highlight messages with notes
Resizable notes
Translated into French
Xnote is licenced under LGPL

You can download XNote on : http://www.starxpert.fr/staroffice/ressources.htm#xnote

or directly : http://www.starxpert.fr/outils/XNote

And if you have some time, we would appreciate feedbacks. PS : if many of you ask for it (let's say more than 10), we could take some time to translate XNote to English or other languages.

Chart Module : new preview released...

2006-07-24T07:20:00.000+02:00

We know that a few of you miss features in the current chart. In order to the improve OOo experience, a new chart module is under development. Even better, you can test a preview of this new module. A new preview version is released approximately once a month on 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 ;-) PS : the last release of the preview was published some weeks ago but as one would say : "Better Late (Than Never)".

OOoCon 2006 : the schedule is out

2006-07-24T00:32:00.000+02:00

Just saw on the main OpenOffice website that the schedule for the OpenOffice.org conferences is out. I am eager to be there as many interresting talks will be held by many great speakers. Good news, the presentation on the new chart module Björn Milcke and I submitted has been accepted. PS : I am impressed to see that Thorsten will deal with two topics ;-)

cmake : a new alternative to autotools (and dmake) ?

2006-07-22T11:32:00.000+02:00

I read a nice entry on the planetkde.org :

How KDE switched to a new buildsystem tool

The blog entry is a link to an article explaining how and why kde moved from autotools to a new alternative called cmake : http://lwn.net/Articles/188693/ I tried cmake this week and from what I saw, it is really nicer to use that any other tool I tested. Maybe some day OOo could rely on it and avoid having to maintain dmake ?

OOo Solver, what's that ???

2006-07-04T13:20:00.000+02:00

Last week, I wanted to work on the OOo development on a fresh new PC. Hence, I started building from scratch the whole OpenOffice.org one more time... That took me around 10 hours (if I do not count the time I spend on correcting errors*). That's quite too much for someone that has some time to work on OOo but not entire weeks. Developpers could wish to start developping on OOo without having that compiling step. This is where the "Solver" comes. The solver is exactly an already compiled OpenOffice.org that allows a developper to start working on the code and avoid the building step**. That could seem like a perfect solution, but it has some drawbacks and limitations :

a solver is huge (around 2G not zipped)
each Linux distribution needs its own solver because of incompatibilities between the tools versions (gcc, java...)

Let's ignore the space problem of the solver and concentrate on the second issue. On Windows, there are no problems related to libraries, so why should we have on Linux ? Couldn't we provide an entire environment with everything that is needed so that a developper only needs to unpack a tarball in a directory, launch a script that changes the environment variables and start to develop ? I think that helping new developpers to work on OOo is a key to its success, and the compiling step is quite discouraging. Maybe the ease of setting the environment could help and attract the developpers of tomorrow. What do you think ? * : all the errors where related to not having installed the right libraries at the right place, but it took me some time to understand it. ** : how developpers work on StarOffice

OpenOffice.org Calc Tips : drag & drop in a chart

2006-06-30T13:55:00.000+02:00

Björn Milcke from Sun made me discover today a nice feature of the chart module : using drag & drop with charts. Have a look at the following picture : I would like to create a diagram displaying the three ranges A to C. As you may notice, I forgot to select the ranges B and C. So what will I do ? I will just select the two ranges B and C, and then drag & drop them on the chart using the "ctrl key". This will add directly my two ranges to the chart ! Nice, isn't it ? PS : to drag & drop the range, you first need to select it, and then click on it for some time before moving your mouse. This is the same behaviour as to move cells around a sheet. PS 2 : if the ranges do not have the same number of values, the result is... weird. but this will be corrected in some time ;-)

New addon released : OOoMultiDiff

2006-06-17T11:23:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, we (StarXpert) released a new Add-on for OpenOffice.org called multidiff. This Add-on simplifies sending OpenOffice.org documents in ODF, PDF or Ms Office format. It is mostly useful for basic users of OpenOffice.org who are not used to the different formats. Features :

Works with all the OOo modules (Writer, Calc...)
Send the document by mail (attached under ODF, PDF or MS Office)
Save document (under ODF, PDF or MS Office)
Follow modifications
Translated into French and English
OOoMultiDiff is licenced under LGPL

You can download OOoMultiDiff on : http://www.starxpert.fr/staroffice/ressources.htm#ooomultidiff And if you have some time, we would appreciate feedbacks.

OpenOffice.org Calc Tips : Modifying borders around a table

2006-06-03T16:36:00.000+02:00

Have a look at the screenshot below. As you might notice, this is a really simple invoice designed in Calc. Some of the formating of this array is already done using borders. Now, you would like to add borders around the invoice to make it look better (range B5:E12). By default, if you select the range B5:E12, and try to add borders using the borders icon in the UI, everything will be fine. But this is limited because you can not choose the width and the color of the borders. In order to modify the width and the color, you have to use the borders dialog (format > cells > borders). While using the borders dialog, one may try to add borders using the second icon beginning from the left in the dialog (see sreenshot above). This may be tricky as it deletes the borders around each article in our example above. To avoid it, there is a special feature in the borders dialog . The highlighted button in the screenshot below does exactly the trick : it will add borders but will not delete what you already did.

Migrating to Suse 10.1

2006-05-27T01:37:00.000+02:00

This week-end I went back to my parent's house in the East of France. As always I was asked to clean the PC and make it work correctly. This included solving the issue causing the mail client stoped sending and receiving mails. This was an easy fix : there was no more free space and as always, I wonderered where was the free space gone (as always my sister knew...). Anyway, some years ago I had conviced the family to switch to Linux and had set-up a Fedro core 2. Everybody was quite happy with it but some features where lacking like accessing easily to USB devices (some times the automount was morking and sometimes not...). I though it was a good reason enought to switch to a new distribution : Suse 10.1. As I was also wanting to test it myself it was a perfect time ! From the beginning to the end, everything went smoothly. I started installing the basics, then :

configured e-mails (and migrated the old account),
tested USB devices (I love the way the sysinfo kio shows information and give access to the devices to users),
installed the internet software (Adobe Reader, Java, flash Player...)
installed the multimedia libs (mplayer, realplayer, mp3 codecs...),
installed the MS TTF fonts,
and finished with the nvidia drivers, xgl and compiz (completely useless, but so good looking)

The only two problems I encountered during all this were about having the mp3 support in amarok and getting the nvidia drivers to work. For the mp3, I first followed the opensuse documentation explaining that you can solve the mp3-codec lack by installing the helix-amarok engine from the non-oss software repository. This works well as long as you do not log out. As soon as I reboot the amarok engine is xine-amarok again... Do not know why but the preferences are not kept. Finally, I followed this link explainning that if you install the xine libs from packman it also works, and the trick was done. For the nvidia drivers, I followed the very well written tutorial from Novel. Everything went right until I called sax2. There my screen resolution was not recognized and the image was out of range ! I solved the problem by specifying to Sax2 a resolution : sax2 -r -m 0=nvidia -V 0:1024x800@60 This resolution was not recognized by sax2. This seems to have forced sax2 to autoconfigure the correct resolution. From this point, everything worked like a charm ! Once all this was finished, everybody started using it. My sister discovered Amarok and she loves it ! I explained her how to get the lyrics the CD jacket and infos about the atists and she really enjoyed re-discovering the titles of her favorite artists. She also liked the xgl effects (but I disabled them because not everyone likes them). For my mum the fact that the mail client stays the same that under Fedora Core 2 was the most important thing. Everybody is now just happy. I love Suse 10.1, it's really well done ! PS : As many people explained it already, yast is not working so well for setting repositories compared to the previous version, but I am sure an update will correct that soon !

Chart2 : building the new chart module

2006-05-24T10:42:00.000+02:00

I've just finished compiling OOo with the new chart moudule enabled on m166. As always, when a resync is done with a milestone, new issues rise... Only two new issues this time and one related to Java 1.5. I also updated the chart2 wiki page.

OpenOffice.org Calc Tip : typing data

2006-05-17T21:41:00.000+02:00

In Calc, one often wants to enter data quickly on several lines. Hence, once you have entered the first line, you click on the beginning of the second line and so on for each line. As, using the mouse is too exhausting for power users, here is a trick for you : - Select a range of cells - Click on the tabulation key Each time you press the tabulation key, you will move to the next cell and once you are at the end of a line, the selection will go back at the beginning of the selection on the following line without clicking.

Integrating the best of Desktops : KDE and Gnome

2006-03-01T13:50:00.000+01:00

Some days ago, a tolltech developper posted this : http://blogs.qtdeveloper.net/archives/2006/02/24/qt-and-glib/ In his post, he explains that in a near future, we may be able to write plugins in QT for a GTK application ! This is a tremendous news : Integrating the best from both worlds is a dream becoming true. Until now, a developper had to choose at the beginning which toolkit to use for the entire application including the plug-in development ! Now a developper will be able to write plugs using the most suitable toolkit for him !

Solution Linux 2006

2006-01-30T22:30:00.000+01:00

Tomorow, I will visit the IT Fair in Paris called Solution Linux ! There, I should met quite some developpers and enjoy all the goodies Novell, Intel, HP and all the others might give :-)

Hello World !

2006-01-30T22:01:00.000+01:00

Well, finally, I decided to start writing a blog. Why ? Perhaps because during my discovery of OpenOffice.org programming, I would like to put down my feelings : "Hugh, who wrote that spaghetti code ?", "Is there any documentation and UML diagrams for OOo code ?", "Why do all developers love white old tennis socks ?"... I Hope a few readers may find those posts interresting enought to lose some time reading them. I promise I will try to make them short enought. PS : as all developers, I do not have much time to lose, so for sure, there will be mistakes in the posts! If you find them, do not hesitate to send a mail!