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OOOCON2007 Presentations

If any presenters do not currently have their presentation available on the programme pages, then please send your presentation to ooocon2007@openoffice.org. We would like to have both an OpenDocument Impress presentation and a PDF generated from it.

If you would like to update your presentation, please send it to the above address, also stating that you would like to update the presentation.

Due to a limitation in the OpenOffice.org infrastructure, we can only receive e-mails less than 2MB in size. If your presentation is larger than this, please send a short mail, and we will help you get it online using a different method.
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Who said Barcelona was going to be cold?

In fact it is rather roasting compared to Edinburgh.

The direct flight with ClickAir was pretty smooth, except for a short time when coming in to land at Barcelona, due to going through a cloud.
Seems that the rumours were true about the iPhone coming to the UK, as reported by Macworld UK. However at £35 per month, I’ll give it a miss until I have some decent income. My current Pay As You Go Sony Ericsson still has plenty of life left in it. It currently takes me about 4 to 8 months to go through £35.
One thing that I found a pain, was the fact that Google suddenly decides to change the language to Spanish (or maybe even Catalan). I found a way around it! All I did was add ?hl=en_GB to the end of the Google URL. UK English not your language, just change en_GB to your own language code.
It has been great to see many of the contributors again from last year. Barcelona seems to be a city to easily get lost in. They too seem to have the tickets that allow you transfer for a period of time after the ticket is first validated. Why isn’t that possible in Scotland?
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OOOCON2007: Incoming Flight Just Arrived

The incoming flight for my flight was delayed by about 20 minutes. The passengers are now getting off, so I should be getting on my flight soon. Seem I’ll be walking straight on. 

South of Edinburgh seems to be clear sky, whereas north is rather dark cloud. No fog here unlike Pavel.

Barcelona seems like it will be roasting compared to Edinburgh last night, which was down to 1°C.
Seems my mobile is cheaper than the wifi hotspots here.
Hopefully the iPhone will be able to be used as a Bluetooth modem when it is rumoured to come to the UK later today.
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OpenOffice.org Aqua 2nd Preview Released

The second OpenOffice.org Aqua Preview is now available for download.

There are a number of new features and bug fixes in this release. There is one major known regression, that will be fixed in a future development build. This time we have not hacked the source to include the Mac OS X native file picker. Instead there is the OpenOffice.org file picker used.
For the record the new things in this version include:

  • Printing now works, though it does not yet use an aqua print dialog
  • PDF export now works
  • Copy and Paste should now work fully
  • OpenOffice.org no longer crashes after quiting
  • Text and graphics are now drawn properly
  • Windows and dialogs mostly now have an aqua theme
  • Combo boxes now look a lot better
  • Various bugs, crashes and performance improvements
  • (QA only) testtool can be hacked to work properly

There are a number of things that do not work in this version. Please do not report anything in the following list, as reporting known issues, just wastes developers time. The known issues currently include:

  • There is a black flash when opening new windows
  • OpenOffice.org still has problems with Aqua’s device resolution indepence
  • There is no Aqua file picker in this release. This is a known regression, the Aqua file picker will be back in a future build
  • Opening a document to open in OpenOffice.org from another application, such as the Finder, Mail or Safari, will mean that OpenOffice.org will open with a blank document. You need to open all documents from within OpenOffice.org
  • The print dialog is not the same as one in other Mac OS X Applications
  • Starting OpenOffice.org from a shared/remote folder does not work
  • Impress will not recognise multiple monitors for presentations
The list on the aqua download page will be updated with more known issues as required.
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Stats for the OpenOffice.org download bouncer

Many of the OpenOffice.org national language teams will be happy with the following announcement.

There are now Download Statistics being produced for the downloads from the bouncer. The stats are generated once daily around 08:05 UTC. Inside the stats folder you will find a series of folders with dates as their name. Inside each of these, you will find a series of files that contain a few different breakdowns of the stats for each particular day. 
For example, 20070621/macos-alllangs.txt shows the number of downloads on the 21st of June 2007, broken down by download for each possible download. I find it strange that there has been 135 downloads for the Mac OS X PPC en-US version of 2.1.0, which is a very old build. The newer OpenOffice.org 2.2.0 for Mac OS X PPC en-US has less than 3 times more downloads. I’m wondering where the 2.1.0 build is linked from.
For a language example, 20070621/allos-de.txt shows a count of all the German downloads on the 21st of June 2007. The most popular German build on that day being Mac OS X Intel, with 102 downloads.
Thanks go to Michael Marineau from OSUOSL for setting up the script.
Please note that these are simply raw requests and and the script that produces them doesn’t take into account builds that don’t exist, but were requested for. Unfortunately there is no week, month or year view of the data at this time. 
The files do mention all version of OpenOffice.org from 2.1.0 up to and including 2.4.0. This has been done so that they will not need to be updated for each release.

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UK Government gives response to OpenDocument online petition

The UK (Westminster) Government has given a response to the petition on a petition calling on the UK Government to use the OpenDocument format for the storage of documents.
Read the UK Government’s response to the OpenDocument Petition

It seems that they are making no firm commitment to use the OpenDocument format, though are continually reviewing the format to store documents in, and converting them accordingly. They welcome the newer open standards, as it makes it easier to convert from one format to another.

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OpenOffice.org Aqua’s first in depth review

The first in depth review of OpenOffice.org Aqua that I have come across is by Greg Kefalas. This is a four part series starting today, so more information in the coming days. I’ll add links to the other parts of the review as they become available.

Part one
Part two
Part three Many of the problems mentioned are already fixed, or will be fixed for the next developer preview. Also the new chart, which is coming in OpenOffice.org 2.3 will be there too.
Part four Some of the issues raised have already been fixed and will be in the next developer snapshot. Having separate application for Writer, Calc, Impress etc. takes a lot of work to redesign the way ooo works otherwise it would have been implemented by now. The first steps in the project is to simply use native controls and get the most important features of Mac OS X implemented. We will then make a stable release. Thereafter we will look into other things like Applescript and re-organising the menus of OpenOffice.org into palettes. However if someone with a special passion for implementing Applescript support into applications comes along today and that’s all they want to do, we won’t stop them, if they are following our coding guidelines.