• Up early; quick mail chew, into Cambridge - need a bigger laptop bag somehow I think. Sync. with Neil, lunch with Rob. Back, ESC call, posted minutes. Train home, dinner. Read babes stories, caught up with KeithP after a long gap - fun; bed.

• Up early; practise with babes, car scraping for J. etc. Mail chew. Discovered my non-functioning webcam, is a functioning webcam, except for some function-keypress to encourage the BIOS to let it show up to the party: good.
• Plugged away at detail; customer call, SOW-refactoring. Really pleased to be kindly invited to openSUSE Conference 2014 to talk about LibreOffice - hope to see you there in beautiful Dubrovnik.

The Document Foundation announces that the Call for Papers for the LibreOffice Conference 2014 is now open. The event will be organized in Bern, Switzerland, from September 3 to 5, at Bern University.

TDF Members and Volunteers are invited to submit their proposals by May 15, 2014, to guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the conference program, base on the following tracks:

a) Development, APIs, Extensions
b) Quality Assurance
c) Localization and Native Language Projects
d) Design
e) Accessibility
f) Certification for Migrations and Trainings
g) Enterprise Deployments and Migrations
h) Open Document Format (ODF)

The Call for Paper page is available at the following address: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2014/call-for-papers.

Proposals, including a short bio of the speaker (max 500 characters) as well as a short abstract of the contents (max 1,000 characters), should be sent to the program committee address: conference@libreoffice.org.

Presentations, case studies, workshops and technical talks will discuss a subject in depth, and will last 60 minutes (including Q&A). Lightning talks will cover a specific topic and will last 20 minutes (including Q&A). Sessions will be streamed live and recorded for download.

Whether you are a seasoned presenter, or have never stood up in public before, if you have something interesting to share about LibreOffice we definitely want to hear from you.

I'm finding it a fairly slow process to find the last 175 dialogs/tabpages in the LibreOffice UI. I have the full list of identifiers, and it's generally not a difficult process to find how to activate any individual dialog from the UI but in the aggregate it takes time and breaks the development flow if I have to stop/start to find the next one to convert.

So, you can help :-) This FindDialogs wiki page contains the list of identifiers and some hints as to how to find them in the source and in the help documentation. That's generally sufficient to determine what dialog they describe and how to launch it.

Filling out those remaining blank "how to activate" entries will speed up the conversion process.

• Up early, mail chew, more admin - wow, how boring my life is, printing, signing, scanning is a way of life it seems. Sync. with Rob, Tim, Kendy, spreadsheet-age; calls. Built ESC bug stats, worked late.

OpenSuSE 13.1 was released on November 2013, so i am late to upgrade my W530 Laptop. The main reason to upgrade is to make Intel’s on board card and NVIDIA’s card work in Optimus Modus. For that the latest kernel version is required.

Following these straight forward instructions to upgrade the distribution from the command line i succeeded to screw it up: i was unable to login with X and had to switch to console/root mode to recover.

The reason for that was NVIDIA native driver, that wasn’t properly updated with new kernel (probably because repository was deactivated). So i think the step to remove it prior to upgrade should be mentioned in instructions.

After removing all NVIDIA drivers and running `mkinitrd` everything was working again. Well almost.

The grub entry on boot screen still shows 12.3 even though it is 13.1, as splash screen image shows:

It turns out it is long standing bug in OpenSUSE. And it is annoying to have to fix it manually:

#replace this line in /etc/default/grub 
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="openSUSE 13.1"
#run
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

• Up early, mail chew. Call with Kendy, Timar, Miklos; lunch, team meeting #1 and #2, sync with Andras; wrote status, admin bits.

If you are a student, love programming, and want to have fun & earn some money at the same time, you should really consider applying for Google Summer of Code 2014. And choose LibreOffice as the project - we have a really nice set of GSoC ideas to work on.

Working on a GSoC task has a real impact - for example the new LibreOffice 4.2 start center is the result of a GSoC task. Yes, the very face of new LibreOffice version is here thanks to Summer of Code.

I am going to mentor this year again, mostly user interface ideas. Let me summarize them here:

• Improved Color Selection
  Something that is really badly needed in LibreOffice. Selecting a color that is not pre-defined is a painful task for users - help us to finally improve the experience there!
• Further improvements in the Template manager
  The Template manager is a result of an older GSoC task too. We would like to integrate it into the new Start center, to get a seamless experience for the user.
• Improve usability of Personas
  This is a task to make the selecting the themes for your LibreOffice more pleasant, with better integration with Firefox Themes.
• Revamp the Gallery tool
  This task will enable the user to browse online gallery of shapes, based on an older work that made this somehow possible.

Each of this tasks will make LibreOffice more beautiful, more useful, and more pleasant to work with.

If you want to apply for any of these, don't forget that we require you to solve a programming Easy Hack first; the more of them you do, the better chances you have that we will select you.

And if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask :-)

Sorry I've no time to help LibreOffice team in last OSC Tokyo (because I've been very busy about MongoDB), then this post is a short summary of Mr. Enoki's one.


LibreOffice Japanese Team exhibited a booth 2 days in Open Source Conference 2014 Tokyo/Spring, and had a talk titled "What's new in LibreOffice 4.2, with brand-new splash screen" by Mr. Ohmori.

Lots of people stopped by the booth and leaflet about new features of LibreOffice 4.2 handed out almost 150.  Someone didn't know the name of LibO, but people who already use LibO seems to grow than last year.

Non-active user of LibO have interest about compatibility with Microsoft Office.  We always say,  new MSO sometimes can't read old format of MSO but LibO can, and about OOXML, we keep going to up interoperability each by each of new versions.

The agents of Shiojiri-city, Nagano-pref. stopped by the booth.  Shiojiri-city had been shift from MSO to OOo almost 2 years ago, then have moved to LibO because of development activity.  They told they have no problem with LibreOffice.  Nice :D


It's happy to hear LibreOffice users seems growing in Japan, and we want to help them in the OSC or any other opportunities.

Thanks!

Last Friday (Feb., 28th) and Saturday (Mar., 1st) was a Open Source Conference (OSC) 2014 Tokyo/Spring.


As I wrote wiki page of the Document Foundation, Open Source Conference is the most important event series in the Japanese FLOSS world.

Of course Tokyo is the biggest city in Japan, and we have OSC two time each year; Spring and Fall.  Recently OSC Tokyo had been hosted Meisei University, which is little far from center of Tokyo, but around of 2,000 FLOSS lovers gathers OSC Tokyo. Amazing!


We, MongoDB JP (MongoDB Users Group (MUG) in Japan), exhibited booth 2 days, and had a session in Saturday.  It was our first exhibit to OSC.

In the booth, we demonstrated a small Web program to find out nearest shops users want using geospacial index and Google Maps API.  Everyone amazed how simple query can do this.
We made leaflet to explain about very basic of MongoDB, and MongoDB JP ourselves.  According to remaining it, 158 people have it, lots of people have interest about MongoDB.  Great!


And Mr. Watanabe's talk gathered almost hundred people. Wow!

Yes, it was little hard 2 days (I was very tired, haha), but, all of we really enjoyed that great time.

Thanks for everyone visited our booth and attended our talk!
And our fellows, Ogawa-san, Fuzisaki-san, Fukuzaki-san, Kubota-san and Watanabe-san!  Good jop!

• Up late, feeling awful; off to NCC, back for a large lunch; slept and slugged for a chunk of the afternoon. Read stories to babies, and put them to bed.

This post is a bit unusual. Let me explain: LibreOffice is a bit like my baby, and when I blog about it, I write with passion but also with the notion to get specific points across.
Now, it does not mean that this post will be different in this regard, but that what’s below represents my very own, personal view as a LibreOffice user who, just like many others, has a more or less long wish list for its favourite office suite. And yes I know: if I want something done, I should submit a patch: but I neither have the time nor skill to do it, this is why my post is not a rant, but only a wishlist. And besides, it’s my birthday in two days, so  bear with me.

• Turn the LibreOffice HTML editor into a nice and powerful web editor

This is something anyone who even knows that LibreOffice has an embedded html editor will know: this tool (a subset of Writer) hasn’t gotten much love since… OpenOffice.org 3.0 something. Which means a very long time. It’s not just about improving the html editor itself, although that improvement alone would be nice. Rather, I was thinking that this editor could have HTML 5, CSS and Javascript added , and perhaps something like a live preview of the page that’s being worked on.

A possible question at this stage would be the reason for such an improvement: After all I don’t use LibreOffice to edit html pages (few people do). Why then? Because I think it’s a feature gap that LibreOffice ultimately suffers from, and it does not have to be excellent at it, but only being able to cater to most common needs in this field. Besides, LibreOffice has an actual IDE that one can use to develop macros and scripts in other languages. I think an improved web editor would complement the IDE just fine as well.

• A Twitter client for Writer

Yes you’re reading that very well. A Twitter client for LibreOffice Writer would probably be a gadget to many, but a handy tool to some. The idea first appeared during FOSDEM 2013 when Chris Anintscyk, head of Open Source matters at Twitter came to the LibreOffice booth to pick up something (I don’t remember what actually), and we started to joke about that idea. But then I thought about it, and didn’t find the idea to be stupid at all, at least for Writer. The client would be integrated in Writer and be used to tweet entire sentences contained in the document opened by LibreOffice Writer at that moment. So instead of tedious copy and paste operation, the client would have a tool selecting the text and then posting immediately to Twitter. Think “quote of the day” twitter handles etc.

• A true calendar for Calc

Calc is becoming really powerful with LibreOffice 4.2.x and we’re only discovering the crazy stuff we can now do with LibreOffice Calc. Yet I’m talking about something more “static” in this case. Of course, you can find several calendar templates online for LibreOffice (link) but that’s not really what I have in mind. the idea would be to have a calendar with the ability schedule and mark events, meetings, etc. and notify contacts directly from Calc. On top of this, Calc would be able to export calendard or events as .ics files.

• STL file export for Draw

If you have never heard of STL don’t worry, only people who are in 3D printing have. (This STL file has nothing to do with LibreOffice STL files, by the way.) Basically, before printing anything in 3D, you need to design your object, and the way you do this is though software. Now I know that there are more powerful graphics and design software out there (the GIMP and Blender being two examples) but frankly today Draw can perform quite well in this field too. Once you have your 3D model of your desin on your computer you need to export it in a file format that will convey the required data for the layering process used by 3D printers. One of the most common, if not the only one, is STL. Ideally then, Draw would be able to have an export to STL, but also perhaps the ability to export to popular 3D modeling formats as well (AMF, DWG or Blender files) . That would not change the need to export everything to STL before turning the design into yet another format (a binary one) : GCode. But it could really be handy.

• Pattern editor for Draw

I’m not done with Draw. We never seem to be pushing this graphics editor much although it is being actively developed but many people don’t try it and just think it’s something like MS Paint. Back to my wish: a pattern editor for Draw is a tool that lets you edit patterns, aka clothing designs. With these designs you can then start to procure clothing material and then move on to the actual knitting/cutting/ making of clothes. Why does it matter? I don’t cut and design my own clothes but I know many people around the world still do or would like to learn that. A Free and Open Source tool like LibreOffice ought to be able to offer that ability to, well, pretty much everyone out there with a computer and do it with open formats and standards.

All in all, this list would not significantly change the userbase of LibreOffice; but it would also position LibreOffice in places and circles where it’s not really used either, and I feel it’s a welcome set of suggestions that differ from the usual Android/iOS porting and cloud based office suite. On a deeper level, I think it also means that LibreOffice as a tool and office suites in general can change and grow to adapt to new usages even today.

Create a new spreadsheet using Microsoft Office 2013. I am using the Italian version on one of the very first ASUS ZenBooks, running Windows 7 (fully updated) with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of SSD.

Place cursor on first cell (A1), and insert the following date: February 1, 1900 (using only numbers, in your preferred date format).

Drag down the right handle until line 30 (A30) in order to fill automaticall the cells with the dates. You should see February 29, 1900, the day that never existed (but was introduced into spreadsheets by Visicalc and then maintained by Lotus and Microsoft). After February 29, 1900, you will of course see March 1, 1900, then March 2, 1900, then… etcetera.

Save the file using the “Save as…” function, as you want to use the OOXML Strict format (while the default one is OOXML 2013 Transitional).

Please be careful in choosing “Spreadsheet Open XML Strict”. The entry is almost at the end of the list (which is slightly odd, as it should be the first one because of its standard nature). Then close the document, then close Microsoft Excel.

Double check the success of the operation. I gave the document the test.xlsx name. Unfortunately, you cannot distinguish an Open XML Strict from an Open XML Transitional from the icon or from the extension.

Launch Microsoft Excel, and open the text.xlsx spreadsheet. You will immediately realize that February 29, 1900 has eventually disappeared (the date has never existed, so this should have always been the norm).

Microsoft choice, here, is to shift down the cells to replace the now missing February 29, 1900. Because of this choice, inside the first cell (A1) there is now January 31, 1900 (which has never been inserted in the document).

At this point, you might want to know what there is after March 1, 1900… Because of this, you drag down the same right handle until line 55. Funny enough, you discover that after March 1, 1900, there is January 31, 1900, followed by the month of February (which is just before March 1, 1900). Weird, and somehow embarassing.

Of course, you start wondering about the format… So, you drag down the right handle until line 80, with the same weird – or embarassing – results.

Well, it definitely looks like Excel has some subtsantial problems in handling Open XML Strict spreadsheets. So, you want to see if the situation changes at all by drawing the right handle down to line 300,000 (yes, three hundred thousand).

Redmond, we have a problem… Let’s list the last ten dates: February 27, February 28, February 14, March 2, March 3, March 4, March 5, February 14, February 15, and of course February 16… Redmond, we definitely have a problem…

Or better, Redmond, YOU definitely have a problem…

The Xcode-provided Clang appears not be bring along the include files needed for plugins, so LibreOffice never ran its set of Clang plugins when building on Mac OS X. Until now.

What works is to build a local copy of Clang, e.g., from trunk with the script

set -ex
mkdir -p "${HOME?}"/Software/clang
mkdir "${HOME?}"/Software/clang/trunk
svn co http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm/trunk \
 "${HOME?}"/Software/clang/trunk/src
svn co http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/cfe/trunk \
 "${HOME?}"/Software/clang/trunk/src/tools/clang
svn co http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/clang-tools-extra/trunk \
 "${HOME?}"/Software/clang/trunk/src/tools/clang/tools/extra
svn co http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/compiler-rt/trunk \
 "${HOME?}"/Software/clang/trunk/src/projects/compiler-rt
mkdir "${HOME?}"/Software/clang/trunk/build
cd "${HOME?}"/Software/clang/trunk/build
"${HOME?}"/Software/clang/trunk/src/configure \
 --prefix="${HOME?}"/Software/clang/trunk/inst --enable-keep-symbols \
 --enable-optimized
make -j8
make install -j8

where --enable-keep-symbols is important on OS X so that the
clang/clang++ executables do export all the symbols
referenced by plugins.

Current Clang trunk has one bug that is triggered by the internal copy of
python3 in LibreOffice, “Concatenated Objective C format string triggers Sema::CheckFormatString ‘String literal not of constant array type!” assert,“ a workaround is to apply the patch

Index: lib/Sema/SemaChecking.cpp
===================================================================
--- lib/Sema/SemaChecking.cpp (revision 202077)
+++ lib/Sema/SemaChecking.cpp (working copy)
@@ -3533,6 +3533,7 @@
   const char *Str = StrRef.data();
   // Account for cases where the string literal is truncated in a declaration.
   const ConstantArrayType *T = Context.getAsConstantArrayType(FExpr->getType());
+if(!T)return;
   assert(T && "String literal not of constant array type!");
   size_t TypeSize = T->getSize().getZExtValue();
   size_t StrLen = std::min(std::max(TypeSize, size_t(1)) - 1, StrRef.size());

to tools/clang.

On recent LibreOffice trunk, with “Allow building compilerplugins/clang on Mac OS X” and “Drop CLANGBUILD in addition to CLANGDIR”, when doing a build of the 64-bit, ≥ 10.8 variant, add

CC=/Users/you/Software/clang/trunk/inst/bin/clang -m64 -mmacosx-version-min=10.8 -isysroot /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.8.sdk
CXX=/Users/you/Software/clang/trunk/inst/bin/clang++ -m64 -stdlib=libc++ -mmacosx-version-min=10.8 -isysroot /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.8.sdk -isystem /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/lib/c++/v1
CLANGDIR=/Users/you/Software/clang/trunk/inst

to autogen.input. That is, look at the values assigned to CC and CXX in config_host.mk after a plain ./autogen.sh, replace the path to clang resp. clang++, and add the include path to the Xcode libc++ headers to CXX. (You can likely also drop the implicit -m64 and -stdlib=libc++.)

And that’s it.

Accessibility is one of the areas of interest for us at Igalia, that’s why I traveled to Brussels some weeks ago to take part in the LibreOffice UX hackfest organized by The Document Foundation and kindly hosted by Betacowork. My colleage Joanmarie Diggs, maintainer of Orca, had identified a set of bugs that will be instrumental in improving the experience with the screen reader; as she keeps saying, “Orca can only provide access to what is made accessible.”

Before diving into the specifics, let me introduce the accessibility layers of LibreOffice first. Due to its multi-platform nature, LibreOffice provides its own Visual Components Library (VCL), with a graphical toolkit in the fashion of GTK+, Qt, etc. It serves as an operating system abstraction, and it is mapped to system-specific libraries whenever possible. When it comes to accessibility, there is a set of internal accessibility APIs that can be translated into ATK objects and functions in the same way it can be translated to IAccessible2 API in Windows.

The first thing I tackled was implementing and improving the accessible roles exposed by LibreOffice. Better role support means smarter client applications: for example, an object registering itself as a spreadsheet document allows the screen reader to make some assumptions about the structure of that document and present its contents more efficiently, and in a more tailored fashion, than it could for a generic document. And navigation by heading only works if headings claim to be headings rather than paragraphs.

Bug #39944 is about adding support for new(ish) ATK roles which LibreOffice wasn’t using yet. Checking the list of existing internal roles we find out that some of the new roles fit properly in the existing API, for example group box and comment internal roles match with ATK’s grouping and comment. But other roles had to be added from scratch. This was the case for the new, specific roles for spreadsheet, text and presentation documents that I added to LibreOffice API and linked to their ATK relatives.

Bug #35105 was a trickier one, because it looked more simple than it was… The problem as reported was that headings in text were not exposed using the proper heading role. But as I dug deeper, I discovered a much more complicated issue: paragraphs that could become headings, and the opposite, as a result of editing the document. LibreOffice lacked support for accessibility objects changing their roles, so I added a new event to the API to notify role changes, and connected that event with atk_object_set_role.

I also spent quite some time working on bug #35107. Again, it looked like a simple role-support bug, but I had learned not to trust the first impression. To debug this one, I first had to learn about the ATK hypertext interface and hyperlink objects. Having done so, I was able to verify that LibreOffice’s existing hypertext implementation was working properly. The same didn’t hold true for the hyperlink; in particular, the implementation of hyper_link_get_object in LibreOffice was wrong. A patch is still pending because it requires involving the third member of the ATK hyper-family, AtkHyperlinkImpl, of which there is no trace in LibreOffice (yet) and thus has to be implemented from scratch. Anyway, it was an interesting debugging and documentation-reading exercise.

Happy hacking!

Flavors from Brussels

The LibreOffice extensions site is running on Plone with some addons. I’m currently working on a new flat structure of the site with new content types and views. I worked first on the structure that has only three content types instead of five now. The user (contributor) had only to create a project and could add releases with files to that project then.

I finished my work (draft status) on the content types for the contributors (project and release) first and drafted a view with features for the extension center in the last days. You could get the current status of the add-on from the github repository of the Document Foundation:

https://github.com/tdf/tdf.extensionsuploadcenter

I’m looking for a resource where I could set up a test environment of the new site. A virtual machine will be created for this purpose by our admin team in the next days.

Berlin, February 20, 2014 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.2.1, three weeks after the availability of LibreOffice 4.2. The first minor release – based on a shorter cycle than expected – solves over 100 problems, introduced by the larger than usual code refactoring of the LibreOffice 4.2 family. The changelog is available here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.2.1/RC1

“LibreOffice 4.2 was extremely ambitious, in terms of code refactoring. Because of this, we planned an extensive quality assurance cycle, based on automated tests followed by QA sprints in December and January, but we were not able to catch all the issues”, says Thorsten Behrens, Chairman of The Document Foundation. “Based on early adopters feedback, developers and QA experts have jumped in immediately, and have solved the most urgent problems in less than three weeks, showing the importance of our large community.”

LibreOffice 4.2.1 and LibreOffice 4.1.5 will be on stage at CeBIT in Hannover from March 10 to March 14 (Hall 6, Booth H14). In addition, Florian Effenberger and Italo Vignoli will speak about LibreOffice at the Open Source Conference.

LibreOffice 4.2.1 is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to grow the infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level.

All versions of the Bug Submission Assistant had a same origin policy problem preventing user feedback. It was fixed by asking for a server side reverse proxy definition and a variable that can be controled by the enclosing frame. diagnostic … Continue reading →

The component interaction described by Kevin Hunter was implemented. The confusing attachment path was hidden from the user. The user agent is included in the bug description. component interaction When the list of components is first displayed, the comment area … Continue reading →

The Bug Submission Assistant is built from information found in wiki and bugzilla. When they disagree, either because of a spelling mistake or another inconsistency, the Bug Submission Assistant fails. sanity checks were implemented to detects such inconsistencies and they … Continue reading →

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From august 29th, 2011 to this day, the Bug Submission Assistant was implemented and released. Getting started After reading the backlog dated back to February 2011, the original script was reimplemented using JQuery to get familiar with the subject. In … Continue reading →

Dear lazyweb,

Do you know of any way to catch OS X sandbox violations as they happen (in a huge program like LibreOffice where you don't have a clue what is going on in all places in the codebase) in a debugger (either gdb on the command line, or lldb under Xcode)? The trick using Dtrace in https://devforums.apple.com/message/874181#874181 does not seem to work in 10.9.1 at least.

I worked a bit more on the source code for the improved LibreOffice extensions repository today and pushed the current state of my work to the github repository of The Document Foundation:

https://github.com/tdf/tdf.extensionsuploadcenter

Berlin, February 19, 2014 – The new Board of Directors of The Document Foundation is officially in charge from February 18, 2014, to February 17, 2016.

Elected as members, in order of votes, are: Thorsten Behrens (independent), Eliane Domingos de Sousa (independent), Michael Meeks (Collabora), Fridrich Strba (independent), Adam Fyne (CloudOn), Joel Madero (independent) and Bjoern Michaelsen (Canonical). Elected as deputies, in order of votes, are: Andreas Mantke (independent), Eike Rathke (Red Hat) and Norbert Thiebaud (independent).

During its first meeting, the board has elected Thorsten Behrens as Chairman and Eliane Domingos de Sousa as Deputy Chairman. In addition, Florian Effenberger has been promoted to Executive Director, with the responsibility of helping the Board of Directors to coordinate and control the foundation activities.

“The new board offers a good balance between the old OOo heritage and the new LibreOffice spirit, with several people representing both souls of the project. In addition, has a wider geographical coverage than the previous one, as there are 6 people from Europe, 3 from the Americas and one from Middle East”, says Thorsten Behrens.

As of January 1st, 2014, The Document Foundation has over 190 members and thousands of volunteers worldwide.

The project is supported by companies and organizations who sit on the Advisory Board: AMD, CloudOn, Collabora, Free Software Foundation, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Google, Intel, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), Lanedo, MIMO (Inter-Ministry Mutualisation for the Open Productivity Suite), Red Hat, Software in the Public Interest (SPI), Studio Storti and SUSE.

After a few years of announcements, releases and online reviews, I am still out there looking for the right, if not the perfect, Twitter client on Linux. And believe me, this quest is frutstrating.

Why would I want to use a Twitter client on my desktop?

That’s a good question. I could just open a new tab on my browser and have Twitter there. Let’s face it: a good twitter client should bring more value than the web page of Twitter while developing what I feel is the actual raison d’être of an actual client: to make it easy and pleasant to tweet and read the twitter feeds outside of a browser as if Twitter was a separate network. In practice, this means that the way notifications are carried on to the user matters a lot: they must be at the same time non-intrusive yet informative enough while being customizable by the user. The interaction with the browser should be no problem at all while the interface ought to display the twitter feed and a clear interface with additional information (retweets, replies, conversation, favorites…)

If a client is not gearing towards these aims then I actually wonder what good it could provide on the desktop, if any.

In my experience with such Twitter clients on Linux, the issues I faced were often different, and that what contributed greatly to make this a frustrating experience. Basically, several Twitter clients I used had these drawbacks, either several of them at the same time, or at least one of those:

- poor and slow refreshing of the feeds (and I have a fast bandwidth)
- general instability
- inability to customize notifications
- unclear interface
- no real notifications mechanisms

Add to this the fact that for years I really wanted to have a “dual network” client, meaning, I needed to follow both Twitter and Identi.ca . I kind of dropped Identica since last year and I’m now mostly on Twitter (sorry Evan). With this requirement dropped off the choice of clients gets a bit broader but does not significantly change the situation. Let’s turn now to the actual Twitter clients for Linux I’ve tinkered with.

The deskbar

Many years ago, by which I mean those heroic times where people used Gnome 2 and Ubuntu was progressing to the point of reaching the most used Linux distribution on the desktop. There was no Unity, and a bunch of volunteers came up with something really nice for the Gnome DeskBar, which at that time could let you search many things in your system, but not much else. So they developed the ability to tweet from the deskbar, and not just tweet, but dent as well. It worked well… for a while. For one thing, you could not see your twitter feed, but you could post. And then Gnome 3 came in and terminated the deskbar by replacing it with a more central search bar in its new interface. Gone was the deskbar twitter client.

The StatusNet client

Now it was a nice client for the time, but it was only working with Statusnet microblogs and networks, and while it looked sleek at that time, it was also rather slow.
At some point it became obvious it was also not actively maintained. So I went to look elsewhere.

Gwibber

Gwibber appeared as “the” twitter client from Ubuntu. And it works really well on it too. It has a nice integration with Ubuntu’s interface and the client works with Twitter, identi.ca and several other services. In fact it is one of the most complete Twitter client out there. The problem? I don’t use Ubuntu, I use ArchLinux. Arch Linux does not tweak or customize its Gnome desktop in anyway; what is packaged is what comes out of the Gnome project. Gwibber, however, is packaged in the Arch User Repository (AUR) and I can honestly say that in 4 years I have only seen Gwibber’s integration with a vanilla Gnome desktop improve marginally. In other words: Gwibber is at best extremely unstable but most of the time, will just not start. There’s always some component missing or broken, but surely 4 years areenough for either one of the project to fix that mess? While I cannot speak for users of distributions such as Fedora, Debian, OpenSuse, Mageia, etc. Gwibber seems to be working fine on Ubuntu only, just like it took a long time get Nepomunk’s integration working on distribution other than Mandriva Linux. At the end of the day; Gwibber is not usable today for me. Moving on.

Pino

Pino was an interesting attempt, and I’m not sure its original developers ever intended to give it the political twist of being the Twitter client for “the rest of us who don’t use Ubuntu”. Pino is written in Vala, and as such was working pretty well. Helas, it also became rather quickly unusable to the point where it would not start, but reinstalling it would fix that until the next refusal to start, or the next fatal crash. I haven’t tried Pino for a while but perhaps it’s just that I got tired of it.

Hotot

Hotot seemed nice, but by that time I was starting to get wary of these new Twitter clients for Linux. I tried several versions of Hotot, some were a bit problematic, but tended to work. My main pet-peeves with Hotot? It takes a while to refresh and to load feeds, while its interface does not make it clear what became of the message you just tweeted. What ultimately cut it for me was the actual development of Hotot. If you go to the project’s page today you will see that it did stop at some point. It was however unclear to me even at the time of Hotot 1 and 2 what exactly was happening, as the development started of really fast, then seemed to go through a complete code rewrite that generated some more instability. At the end of the day, I still have hotot somewhere on my systems, but I hardly use it, and it seems to be broken anyway.

Qtwitter

This used to be a nice Twitter client. Because it was made on Qt, it was working well on my Mac and my Linux systems, and that made it really interesting. The development stopped though; but the take away here is that its strong points are the fact that it is (was) multi-platform and that its notifications work well. It was however rather unstable (crashes) on Linux.

Choqok
Let me make it straight in one sentence: Choqok works, works well and works fast, it’s too bad it’s not Gnome software as I’m a primarily a Gnome user. But Choqok fits the bill in almost all of the criteria I’ve mentioned above. It’s only issue, I think is that its notifications are just not that relevant. At least, when using KDE it will the number of tweets that are arriving, but in the notification area of the KDE desktop, and that’s about it. I’m sure I could customize it, but I have not found how. So Choqok, which I do use often, is really the client…. if it was not primarily a KDE client.

Birdie

So far, Birdie is a really nice Twitter client for Gnome; and it is really customizable. It does have some instability but the options are really powerful and I’m sure I haven’t taken advantage of everything it can offer yet. I might be wrong but it seems it is a rather young project started in 2013, and one will have to see its “endurance”. I really wish they can improve their stability, but to me Birdie is the hot ticket of the moment for Twitter clients.

Caveat Emptor: this post is not intended as a way to start a flamewar, but only recounts my personal experience with each of the software I’ve mentioned. Something I’d really like to see would be a LibreOffice Twitter client… more on this later. 

The last days I drafted views for the project and the release view of the improved LibreOffice extensions center. There is the top-level view or home page of the new center left. I’m currently working on this view (page) and created some parts of the view, e.g. a link to start with a new project and a web form to search for projects / extensions releases, but the view is not finished yet and will take some time to get in an early draft status.

It's been brought to my attention that the Icecream documentation more or less suggests it is necessary to manually set up $ICECC_VERSION (which also involves creating the environment tarball with the compiler and so on). That is incorrect. I've already updated the documentation to say that, like with pretty much everything, Icecream simply figures it out itself by default.

So if you happen to use $ICECC_VERSION, unless you know why you do that (e.g. cross-compilation), don't. It's not only simpler but also better to leave it up to Icecream to package the system compiler as necessary, as it simply works, and avoids possible problems (such as updating the system compiler and forgetting to update the tarball).

One of the distinct advantages of free software is the diversity of the community, which often translates in a wider language support. This is the case of LibreOffice, which is able to support a larger number of languages than Microsoft Office (and of other open source office suites).

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The table is based on information available online, about available language packs for LibreOffice, Microsoft Office, Apache OpenOffice and Calligra (which users can download to have at least the User Interface in their native language).

Numbers are native language speakers, according to the last version of Ethnologue (which is considered a reference from Wikipedia, and other sources as well).

If you find a mistake, please leave a comment and I will update the document as soon as possible. Any other comment to this post will be deleted.

The new structure of the LibreOffice extension site could use a more flat hierarchy with three content types: the extension center, the extension project and the extension release. In my last blog post I described and showed a draft of the view of the extension release content type. I worked on the view of the extension project and you could see in the screenshot below what the draft currently looks like. There is currently no layout without the hard coded styles of the table at the bottow of the site. The screenshot should only show the fields (information / links) that will be displayed to the user of the site.

I had a discussion on the LibreOffice website-mailinglist the last days about the new LibreOffice extensions website and we developed the idea to create a more flat hierarchy of the new site. Thus I created a new set of python modules with that structure:

• The Extensions Center
• The Extension Project
• The Extension Release (with the options to choose and upload extension files)

I added also new views to this modules and worked on the one for the release first. This view uses only the default view for the created entries. It should only show the fields that are available. I made a screenshot from a release with a list of 6 files and another one with no extension file. It shows that empty files are not presented.

The screenshot below shows a release with six files.

And the next screenshot shows a release without a file yet.

I’ll work on the views of the other modules the next days.

  Converting LibreOffice dialogs to .ui format, 190- conversions remaining

We've now converted 77% of LibreOffice’s classic fixed widget size and position .src format elements to the GtkBuilder .ui format.

Using the guesstimate tool ./bin/count-todo-dialogs the current status is:

666 .ui files currently exist
There are 96 unconverted dialogs
There are 93 unconverted tabpages
An estimated additional 189 .ui are required
We are 77% of the way through.

What makes this mini-milestone interesting to me is that there are less that 200 to go now, and there are less than 100 of each of the two categories of elements remaining.

The latest of this latest bunch of conversions is the conversion of the pivot table dialog which has the side effect that the pivot table dialog now fits into a 768 pixel tall netbook screen when in expanded mode.

Berlin, February 13, 2014 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that the LibreOffice Conference 2014 will be jointly organized by the Swiss Open Systems User Group (CH Open, http://www.ch-open.ch) and the Research Center for Digital Sustainability of the Institute of Information Systems at the University of Bern (http://www.iwi.unibe.ch/content/index_eng.html), and hosted by the University of Bern, from September 3 to September 5, 2014.

In addition, on September 2 the LibreOffice community will gather for several face-to-face meetings: Board of Directors, Engineering Steering Committee, and Certification Committee. During the conference week, TDF will also organize the first certification training session for migration and training candidates.

Bern is the federal city of Switzerland and the seat of the parliament, government and administration of the Swiss Confederation, the Canton of Bern and the City of Bern. The old city is a UNESCO world heritage site since 1982.

“Holding the LibreOffice Conference in the city of Bern will definitely improve the awareness of Open Source software in Switzerland, and hopefully trigger the migration process in public administrations which has already started in France, Germany and Italy”, say Nicholas Christener and Matthias Stürmer, leaders of the organization committee.

Support The Document Foundation

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to expand the infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level.

The last week, just after FOSDEM, I was one of the lucky ones who participated in the LibreOffice UX Hackfest that was generously hosted by +Betacowork.

We achieved a lot (incomplete list - many haven't added their achievements yet), but I want to particularly highlight the result of me teaming up with +Joren dc and +Tor Lillqvist. It is the new look of LibreOffice on OS X:

Improved OS X look of LibreOffice

Have a look at the toolbar - it is using CoreUI to render the gradient in a native way. It is based on similar work that has been done for Firefox - thank you, Markus Stange, for your observations & code, we have reused pieces under the MPL license.

It is visible that the work is not finished yet; we need to extend the gradient to cover even the title bar (or how is it called exactly?), but there is enough time for the LibreOffice 4.3 feature freeze in May - I am sure it will be perfect by then.

Other Improvements

Other than that, I have extended the new Start Center to be able to show previews of other file formats than just ODF. As a sideeffect, it should improve the startup speed with many previews.

The last thing I've done was that I have converted the Template Manager to use dynamic widget layout. This led to removing many hacks there that made the Template Manager resizable even before - but using the .ui is much more elegant, and potentially may allow integration of the Template Manager directly into the Start Center.

Overall, the UX hackfest was awesome - I am really looking forward to the next one :-) Thank you, Mirek, for organizing it!

Im kind of over gettin told to throw my hands up in the air

so there

Team, Pure Herione, Lorde

So, somewhere between the LibreOffice 4.2.0 and the 4.1.5 release, bugs.freedesktop.org broke through 25.000 reported bugs. A time to throw the hands up in despair? Not at all, as the following chart shows:

• 7% of reports are still unconfirmed or need more information
• 22% are confirmed and unresolved issues, that are not enhancements requests
• 6.5% are unresolved enhancement requests.

On the other hand:

• 33% of all reports have been fixed in some way
• and 30% are invalid or duplicates.

Its interesting to see how now a quarter of the confirmed unresolved reports are asking for new features and enhancements. Its gets even more encouraging, if you take into account that the number of bugs reports is at a long term constant 20-25 reports per day, while over 40% of the bugs intentionally or collaterally fixed changed their state in the last 12 month. So we are picking up speed in triaging and fixing bugs, while the influx of new reports stays constant.

If you are interested, please help QA quite a bit in all this by writing good bug reports, identifying duplicates, confirming new reports, bibisecting regressions, run and test daily builds and prereleases or otherwise helping with the QA Easy Hacks!

Berlin, February 11, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.1.5, for Windows, MacOS X and Linux, the fifth minor release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family targeted to large deployments in enterprises and public administrations (which should always be supported by TDF certified developers: http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/developers/).

Meet the Community

From March 10 to March 14, The Document Foundation will exhibit at CeBIT in Hannover (Hall 6, Booth H14) to showcase LibreOffice 4.2 and LibreOffice 4.1.5. In addition, Florian Effenberger and Italo Vignoli will speak about LibreOffice at the Open Source Conference, of the project infrastructure and of a reference protocol for large migrations.

Support The Document Foundation

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to expand the infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level.

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 4.1.5 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice can be obtained from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center.
Change logs are now available at the following links: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.5/RC1 (fixed in 4.1.5.1), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.5/RC2 (fixed in 4.1.5.2) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.5/RC3 (fixed in 4.1.5.3).

It’s so hard when it doesn’t come easy

It’s so hard when it doesn’t come fast

– So Hard, Taking The Long Way, Dixie Chicks

So, LibreOffice 4.2 is released, FOSDEM is over, was very nice and I am back home in Hamburg after a week in London. I missed the LibreOffice UX Hackfest for that, which I heard was also awesome. So without further ado, here are the slides from my quick talk at FOSDEM:

(direct link if you are watching this on a planet that does not support embedded speakerdecks: https://speakerdeck.com/sweetshark1/liberated-build-system-mission-accomplished)

and some errata for it: On slide 13 it says “the same file is also hardlinked from workdir/” — thats not true for quite a while already. LibreOffice keeps around exactly one copy of a library, unlike the confusing three copies that we had in LibreOffice 3.3. This should be a lot less confusing to the curious first time contributor.

Reviewing all these changes in toto, it became how much we simplified getting involved with LibreOffice through this. As the lyrics quoted above say: “Back when we started, we didn’t know how hard it was”.

If there is just one number to take away from all these slides, its that a noop rebuild for LibreOffice on a three year old developer notebook with the distro provided GNU make 3.81 takes just 17 seconds^(*). And slide 7 shows still some possibilities to still speed things up beyond that — and while at current speeds it might not be worth it on Linux, it might be worthwhile for e.g. Windows, which is traditionally rather slow when it comes to file I/O.

On a related note, over time we improved the way new contributors can submit their changes on our instance of gerrit in many ways. Thanks a lot to David, Norbert and Robert for the work on this. One only has to look at one of daily digests generated from activity on gerrit and imagine we would still get one mail for each change, update and merge to the mailing list for manual patch tracking as we did in the early days. Thanks a lot also to Mathias Michel for his work on the script!

So if you haven’t done that yet, consider graping an EasyHack and get started!

A copy of the original .odp is also available at FOSDEM or on the LibreOffice wiki.

^(*) This includes checking 1.3GB of generated c++ dependency files for some >8000 object files, which we simplify to <350MB.