KOffice at the ODF plugfest and ooocon 2009

I spent the last week in the beautiful Italian city of Orvieto in Umbria, a little over 100 km north of Rome. The reason for that was that something called the ODF Plugfest was arranged by the dutch organization Opendoc Society. The Opendoc Society is interested in spreading the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and in interoperability between different applications using ODF. I was there as a representative for the KOffice community and also for my company KO GmbH that sells services around KOffice and OpenDocument. With me from the KOffice community was Jos van den Oever, also from KO, and Thomas Zander from Nokia.

The plugfest was held during monday and tuesday, and during wednesday - friday, the OpenOffice.org conference ooocon2009 was held in the same city. I missed the first day due to problems getting away from home and also a late flight into rome. The end result was that I had to spend one night in Rome, which normally would be a good thing but was irritating this time.

The plugfest had around 30 attendants, and the OOo conference 10 times more. It was interesting to see all the implementations of ODF, with OpenOffice.org as the largest one and all of its offsprings: EuroOffice, Red Office from Red Flag Linux, Symphony from IBM, etc, etc. KOffice is clearly the second largest free implementation and MS Office is quickly stepping up as a new contender with the tenacious Doug Mahugh as its champion.


As expected, the plugfest indicated that there is not yet perfect interoperability, but it also indicated that every application has been improved since last year. Also as expected, most of the problems were found in less used parts of the standard. Rob Weir of IBM brought a test document for OpenFormula, the formula specification for ODF 1.2. Most applications got good results on that test. Some difficulties arose around the definition of color gradients in ODF, where KOffice implements the SVG type of gradients, which are more powerful, but both OOo and MSO implemented the draw:gradient definition from the ODF draw specification. A lot of discussion came out of that one, which will undoubtly lead to an even better result next year. For some of the tests, KOffice didn't implement all of the features in the test yet (e.g. pivot tables) so we didn't get any good result there.

Something that I found interesting is the respect that KOffice receives these days from the other parties. That is a refreshing change from a year ago when many of our announcements often were met with questions of "why not just program on OOo instead?". All of the KOffice developers know that it's not as mature as OOo. We also know that despite this, KOffice has a number of advantages against OOo, such as a well designed code base, built on a solid toolkits (Qt and kdelibs), and only a tenth of the lines of code despite more applications. It is nice to see that this information has now spread outside the KOffice community as well and people seem to understand that with the current speed of development, KOffice will very soon be a viable alternative for the normal user.

During both the plugfest and, especially, the OOo conference were given a number of interesting presentations. The keynotes talked about adoption of ODF and deployment of OOo. Of the technical presentations, I found especially interesting a presentation about the the next version of ODF (1.2) by Rob Weir of IBM, and also about the next generation after that -- ODF-Next. Doug Mahugh from Microsoft gave a presentation about interoperability with MS Office and some choices they had to make. I gave a presentation about an idea for a toolkit called the OdfKit together with Alexandro Colorado (I will blog about that separately).

No week can be spent in Italy without eating and drinking well. The organizers had really spent a lot of effort (and I suppose money) on bringing good food and wine to the delegates. There was a party every night except friday, and the spirits were always high. During the plugfest we were also given wonderful lunches complete with desert and cheese afterwards. Thank you!


All in all, it was a very good week. The surroundings were very nice, the people pleasant, the food very good and the contacts that were made between the communities were great. The OOo people now know a little more about KOffice, and we know more about the team that creates OOo. I will definitely go to the next plugfest and hopefully KOffice will be able to show off even more features then.

KOffice Sprint is now Officially On

So, here I am now again at the KDAB offices in Berlin. Once again I'm meeting with Cyrille, Jan, Pierre, Johannes and many of the other KOffice hackers to discuss things about KOffice and get some hacking done. This time the topic is release planning: We want to make using KOffice 2.0 a good experience for the user even if it doesn't fulfill the whole potential of the new frameworks, just like KDE 4.0 didn't fulfill all the potential of the KDE4 frameworks.

To make it clear to our users what they can expect, we will have two parallel tracks here: a technical track that will try to pinpoint all the technical problems so they can be fixed, and a marketing track where we will try to formulate a consistent message about KOffice and KDE on the 3 main platforms: Unix, Windows and Macintosh. For some good thoughts about this, see Sebas' wonderful blog from yesterday.

Marble Code Swarm

I'm doing the final packing now before going to Akademy, but before that I thought I'd show a little gem that the Marble gang found on the net. It's called project code_swarm, and it creates a video of how a software project was developing. It will show the various contributors and how their contributions vary in size and amount over the time.


Take a look at the "Get Involved" page of Marble and download the incredibly cool video and view it. I'm sure we will see plenty videos like this one in the near future.

And, btw...

OpenDocument is Now a Real ISO Standard

Yesterday ISO, the International Standards Organization, finally made the OpenDocument Format (ODF) specification into a real ISO standard by pushing the specification into stage 60/60. This means that every government on earth could -- and indeed should -- specify ODF as the preferred format for storing office files.

This is very good news for KOffice since we were the first office suite that used ODF as the default file format and is now only superseded by OpenOffice.org in the support of it. For more details, see: The ISO website about ODF. Of course, it was known for some time that this was going to happen, but it's still nice when it actually becomes reality.

aKademy wrapup

aKademy is over and it's time to do a summary of it. As most of the
other people I have attended numerous talks, met lots of interesting
and fun people and generally had a great time. But OMG an I tired!

It's interesting to notice that what I thought would be a short
conference followed by a prolonged hack session turned out to be a
week long series of talks, BoFs, meetings, fun nights out but very
little actual programming. People tell me that this is the general
trend for everybody. The first aKademies were real hackfests, but as
the KDE project has grown, so has the number of people attending and
also the complexity of the software. Nowadays most of the time is
spent listening to other people about what they are doing and
coordinating development efforts and sharing experiences with each
other.

So, what have I been up to the last days? I think that I have been
pretty productive, actually. Except for listening to many interesting
talks, I have:

- Held my own presentation about "How to Make Your Program
Popular". Let's see if anybody follows my advice to next year or if
it was wasted effort.

- Done my duty as a member of the KDE e.V and attended the general
assembly.

- Coarranged the ODF day with Waldo Bastian and his wife Tink with
attendants from IBM, OSDL, OASIS and several other important
organisations in the OpenDocument World.

- Formed some sort of relationship between KOffice and a number of
movers and shakers in the same ODF world, for instance OASIS, IBM,
OSDL and the OpenDocument foundation (do you see a connection
here? :-) ).

- Started the formation of a scripted, GUI-less version of KOffice
that the KOffice group will develop the API to in cooperation with
Rob Weir of IBM. This was made possible in a very short time by
our scripting guru Sebastian Sauer who is awesome.

- Talked with the Marketing Working Group, especially Claire Lotion,
about organizing a hack weekend for KOffice 2.0 with an ODF theme
during february next year. This is already in motion, and if we
can just find a good location I'm fairly confident that it will
actually take place.

- Laid out the marketing plan together with Sebastian Kügler of the
Marketing Working Group for KOffice 1.6 that will be out in 2
weeks. Left to be done is to write the actual press releases and
the other announcement documents.

- Talked with the Community Manager of Trolltech about sponsoring and
future interesting projects. Knut is a very dynamic guy with many
fascinating ideas. I'm sure we will have lot of things to work
together on in the future.

- After listening to the lightning presentation of Okular, noticed
that they are doing their own parsing of the OpenDocument format.
Thinking this is a bad idea, talked to a number of people,
including members of the TWG to do something about that.
Interesting things are happening in this area. More about that in a
future blog.

- Talked to the kdegames people about boardgames and some aspects of
it, like AI's, playing on servers, file formats, protocols, etc,
etc.

- Actually done some programming on kchart, my own little application
in the KDE universe.

- Been out drinking and dancing all nights except two during the
whole 9 days I have been here. I wonder if that has something to
do with why I am so tired right now.

And this is only one person! If you multiply this by 180, the number
of attendants, you will get the full extent of what has happened here
in Dublin. I have never seen such a collection of creative, positive
and generally awesome people before. Never!

Given this, and a number of other things that I have heard about here,
I am more convinced than ever that KDE has a very bright future. KDE4
will be out in the not too distant future, KOffice 2.0 will be out,
and the next generation of the free desktop will have arrived.

Last, I would like to send a very special thanks to Marcus Furlong and
his group of organizers who has done an awesome job!

Usability Bugs and New Developers in KOffice

In a recent blog I mentioned that we now have a Usability component for all KOffice applications in the KDE bugzilla.
The nice thing about these bugs is that, in addition to making the application easier to use if they are removed, they often are pretty easy to fix. In other words, they are perfect Junior Jobs.
Junior Jobs are what we call bugs that are easy to fix, and therefore well suited to new developers. The are a great entry into the often quite complex programs. In Bugzilla, they are marked with JJ: in the title.
In KOffice, we have started to collect these JJs in a special web page at the KOffice web.
So if you are a future KDE developer and agree with us that KOffice is where it's at, then please go to that webpage and pick a task that you like. We will welcome you with open arms. You can also go to #koffice on IRC and talk to us almost 24/7.

Kids Office part 2

When I blogged about Kids Office almost a month ago, I only wanted to present an idea that I had when I took a shower. It was the kind of idea that often comes to my head in lots of different situations.

I had no idea that it would generate such a big interest from a lot of people. I have received 10 comments on the blog alone, and numerous emails. Some people wanted to know if this was just an idea, some provided feedback on the GUI or the basic concept, and some wanted to know when it would be ready.

Curiously enough nobody offered to help with the coding. :-)

Anyway, it is nice to see that I might have stumbled on something that might actually be of use to people. One of the commenters said: Forget the children. Make this for my 58 year-old mother. Perhaps he is right, perhaps this would also be good for those who don't like to use computers, or are afraid of them.
Not one to let good feedback go to waste, I contacted Danny Allen again, and we discussed what we could do about it. We figured that our target group, kids of age 8-10, wouldn't need a full office suite. A writer application and a drawing application would be enough.

So here is the concept of DrawUp, our drawing application that he came up with. It reuses the button bar that we recognizes from WriteUp, and replaces some of the word processing tools to the right with tools more suitable for a drawing application. Here is the application mockup with an empty document:



It uses the same GUI concepts as the word processor described in my earlier blog: large icons, helpful colors, and less features than the full application. It also introduces some other simplifications. Like for instance this:



When you create a new object, you have some easy choices: a circle, a square, freehand drawing, a star, etc. But Danny came up with the concept of a Magic Object. It is a place holder that can be put on the drawing canvas that is like a template for some not so common objects, but still not uncommon:



After you sized and dragged it, you can remodel it into any shape from the magic object palette. The reason for this idea is that we don't want to create configure dialogs for the objects. The way that Karbon and Inkscape does it now is to have, for instance, a polygon tool that can be configured with number of edges. That is too complicated for the small kids that we want to give this tool to.

When you select an already created object, you can transform it in a number of different ways: its' color, the line type, etc, just like in any drawing program:



The difference with DrawUp is that we have tried to make everything as obvious and transparent as possible. Like this, for instance. Notice the lower right corner, where the fill color is shown as the current property to edit. You won't get much clearer than this:



Finally, here is the New / Open dialog. As before, you can you can create a new drawing from a number of simple templates. And you will of course have a preview of earlier created documents.



And finally some words about the implementation. If you want this to become a reality, please volunteer your time and skill. The current engines of KWord and Karbon are great starting points, and both of these programs will probably be little more than new shells (skins if you like) on top of them.

If you volunteer to help with Kids Office, I can almost guarantee you your 15 minutes of fame. I have been approached by magazine editors who wondered if I was implementing it already and when it would be finished. So don't hesitate or be shy. You can mail me or Danny, and you could go into #koffice on irc where we hang out sometimes.