I used the dry wheather and went out for another run. It went better than eine days ago, but it seemed I bot a bit rusty this season. Will try a third one in some days to get the full round weithin an acceptable time slot.

As Tommy kindly mentioned on the QA mailing list, this week the LibreOffice project has surpassed the 40,000 resolved bugs milestone – a huge achievement demonstrating the enormous amount of effort the community puts into software quality. If we take a look at the numbers from August 2016 (the month we started to collect data from Bugzilla) up to now, 7,143 bugs have been closed during this year, with an average of 133 bugs closed each week.…

The post Surpassed the 40,000 closed bugs milestone appeared first on The Document Foundation Blog.

I worked further on my document about foundation management. I wrote some more sections of the German regulations for foundations.  I used sources in German for this reason and wrote my script in German in the first instance.

I worked through a lot of documents and judgments during the last weeks and wrote on a first chapter of an documentation about the management of a foundation. It took me a lot of my spare time but it was worth that investment. I hope that I could finish the last bits of that first chapter during the next week. I wrote the text using LaTex, an always interesting high-quality typesetting system, that is available as free software.

Being an open source product is one of the pillars of LibreOffice. Technically, that means the source code is available with a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.…

The post Survey: What aspects are important to you? appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

I have just visited Taiwan to attend COSCUP, meet representatives of the Taiwanese government and the local community, and run a certification session. Generally speaking, it was a very positive trip, because I was able to get a grasp of the activities at every level. Taiwan is definitely one of the strongholds of The Document Foundation.…

The post Meeting the Taiwanese community appeared first on The Document Foundation Blog.

The Document Foundation’s wiki has lots of resources and materials for marketing LibreOffice in English – such as presentations, flyers, stickers and branding guidelines. But we also want to spread the word about free software and open standards in every country, so we really appreciate our international community which promotes LibreOffice in other languages. One such community member is Nguyễn Vũ Hưng who helps with marketing LibreOffice.…

The post LibreOffice contributor interview: Nguyen Vu Hung appeared first on The Document Foundation Blog.

Collaboration is essential within free and open source software projects – but it’s also important between projects as well. For instance, many LibreOffice users and contributors run it on the GNU/Linux operating system, with KDE as the desktop environment. With this in mind, members of the LibreOffice community attended Akademy, the yearly summit of KDE developers, users and supporters.…

The post LibreOffice at KDE’s Akademy meetup in Almeria appeared first on The Document Foundation Blog.

• LibreOffice core development
• LibreOffice extensions development
• Document templates creation
• Migrations to LibreOffice
• Translating of UI / Help / documents / announcements
• QA (globally or locally)

Sunday: COSCUP

However, I really enjoyed the whole of Today.

Sightseeing Taipei

It was my first sightseeing in Taipei city (mentioned yesterday on Facebook).  I have walked around Presidential Office Building of R.O.C and Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.  I love these beautiful structures.  And history about Chiang Kai-shek is interesting to me as a Japanese.

I also enjoyed a lunch and bubble tea in the Taipei 101 food court, the view of Taipei city from the observatory, and the north gate.  Everything beautiful.

Meeting with Mr. Italo Vignoli and Taiwan LibreOffice people

In the evening, I've joined the meeting with Taiwan LibreOffice people and their awesome guest Italo Vignoli.

Although I couldn't add some valuable comment as a Japanese community member (because lacking both of my experience of migration to LibO and my English skill ;), the time I spent is quite good to me to consider about Japanese NLP's future work deeply.

To be honest, I'm not a political guy as usual Japanese people, but I guess I should do some more "political" things if I love openness like ODF and LibreOffice.

Thanks to Italo for his interesting talk, and Franklin for organizing that night event.  And also many people gathering the evening.

After that, I had the honor to have a dinner with Mark Hung, most active committer to LibreOffice in CJK area.  Thanks to Mark, I had spent a good time to discuss LibO CJK development or else.  It is pity that time was quite limited so we JP and TW communities need to have another opportunity to discuss that :).

I am sorry that I can not express how much I am thankful to all of you who I met while the trip, because of lacking my English skill.  Just say; Thank you so much, I love you!

Starting from July, the TDF team has increased by one unit with the arrival of Teodor Mircea Ionita, aka Shinnok, in the role of Development Mentor.

Teodor has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Iasi in Romania, his native country and city, where he is still living.

We asked Teodor a couple of questions in order to introduce him to the LibreOffice community.…

The post Introducing Teodor Mircea Ionita, aka Shinnok, TDF Development Mentor appeared first on The Document Foundation Blog.

Poodle by Heather Hales

In my previous post Forward Secrecy Encryption for Apache, I’ve described an Apache SSLCipherSuite setup to support forward secrecy which allowed TLS 1.0 and up, avoided SSLv2 but included SSLv3.

With the new PODDLE attack (Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption), SSLv3 (and earlier versions) should generally be avoided. Which means the cipher configurations discussed previously need to be updated.

I’ll first recap the configuration requirements:

• Use Perfect Forward Secrecy where possible.
• Prefer known strong ciphers.
• Avoid RC4, CRIME, BREACH and POODLE attacks.
• Support browsing down to Windows XP.
• Enable HSTS as a bonus.

The Windows XP point is a bit tricky, since IE6 as shipped with XP originally only supports SSLv3, but later service packs brought IE8 which at least supports TLS 1.0 with 3DES.

Here’s the updated configuration:

SSLEngine On
SSLProtocol All -SSLv2 -SSLv3
SSLHonorCipherOrder on
# Prefer PFS, allow TLS, avoid SSL, for IE8 on XP still allow 3DES
SSLCipherSuite "EECDH+ECDSA+AESGCM EECDH+aRSA+AESGCM EECDH+ECDSA+SHA384 EECDH+ECDSA+SHA256 EECDH+aRSA+SHA384 EECDH+aRSA+SHA256 EECDH+AESGCM EECDH EDH+AESGCM EDH+aRSA HIGH !MEDIUM !LOW !aNULL !eNULL !LOW !RC4 !MD5 !EXP !PSK !SRP !DSS"
# Prevent CRIME/BREACH compression attacks
SSLCompression Off
# Commit to HTTPS only traffic for at least 180 days
Header add Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=15552000"

Last but not least, I have to recommend www.ssllabs.com again, which is a great resource to test SSL/TLS setups. In the ssllabs, the above configuration yields an A-rating for testbit.eu.

UPDATE: The above configuration also secures HTTPS connections against the FREAK (CVE-2015-0204) attack, as can be tested with the following snippet:

openssl s_client -connect testbit.eu:443 -cipher EXPORT

Connection attempts to secure sites should result in a handshake failure.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, the Mozilla Foundation provides a webserver configuration generator that almost guarantees an A+ rating on ssllabs: Generate Mozilla Security Recommended Web Server Configuration Files.

• Up, quick mail chew; sync with Andras, Kendy & Miklos. Drove to Lowestoft - worked on mail in the car.

• Up lateish, played with T,B&S for the last times before they left; Lasagne lunch, photos in the garden, bid a sad 'bye.
• Tidied the house up a bit; had a service at home, listened to a STAG talk together; watched a movie, put babes to bed.

• Up earlyish, finished slides, poked at a local online demo. Gave my talk.
• Alberto pointed out that I missed out the great work on Fleet Commander DConf based lock-down done by Stephan B; mea culpa!
• Caught up with some more guys around the place, and set off home by train, wrote a number of connection mails to join some missing dots.
• Caught up with the family, put people to bed;

• Run in the morning with J. back, quick mail chew, paperwork, train to GUADEC - its been too long. Arrived, talked and caught up with lots of old friends, out to a coffee shop for some more action, then a pub, then the evening buffet event; caught up with the SUSE team. Up late talking & writing slides.

With the release of LibreOffice 5.4.0 today, I’m most happy to announce support for OpenPGP / GnuPG keys when signing ODF documents in LibreOffice under Linux. This is great if you already use GPG/PGP for email with your peers, as it ensures authenticity of your ODF documents regardless of the mode of transport or storage.

For any ODF document, simply navigate to File->Digital signatures in LibreOffice, and the certificate selection dialog will transparently list all suitable signing keys on your system, including those from Kleopatra, KGpg, GPA or Enigmail – that perhaps you’re using already for secure email.

Pick a GPG key, and LibreOffice will delegate all password entry and GPG crypto to tried-and-true system components (the LibreOffice process won’t even see you passphrase):

Sign document with GPG key

We also made signature status much more visible – before, signed documents only had a tiny icon down in the status bar (both for valid, as well as for broken or untrusted signatures – not ideal for noticing). LibreOffice there follows the trend set by browsers, to make security features (and broken trust) much more obvious. Your validly signed document will now show up like this:

InfoBar showing signature status

Work is ongoing on adding support for Windows (and perhaps other platforms) as well – as of today, LibreOffice 5.4 supports this feature only under Linux. Furthermore, we also plan to provide GPG-based encryption of ODF documents (currently, document encryption is based on individual passwords), stay tuned!

This work was generously sponsored by the German federal office for information security (BSI), and of course builds on top of great software like GnuPG – many thanks!

• Poked at Raspberry-Pi driving a WS2812B LED strip with H. got the electrical pieces sorted out, plugged it all in, got some smoke: ATX power supply shorting itself via some helpful trailing leads - phew. Very early RPI not doing the PWM magic at all - mis-detection of the H/W it seems.
• Out to Bury Gardens, babes recording a wizard movie with T., to augment with Blender at home.
• Back home, got the LEDs setup & working with some cannibalized Pi 2 - did some programming in the evening with H.

There are many user of LibreOffice that contribute their templates to the public under a free software license. The Document Foundation provides a website to host such LibreOffice templates. The site hosts 352 template projects now. You could search for this LibreOffice templates and download them from: https://extensions.libreoffice.org/templates

Das LibreOffice-Projekt ist zwar rund um den Globus verteilt, doch was gibt es Schöneres (und Wichtigeres!), als sich auch mal von Angesicht zu Angesicht zu treffen, um die Ereignisse der vergangenen Monate Revue passieren zu lassen und Pläne für die Zukunft zu schmieden? Die modernen Medien ermöglichen zwar Videokonferenzen über alle Kontinente hinweg, doch der persönliche Kontakt ist einfach durch nichts zu ersetzen.

Genau das haben wir vor anderthalb Wochen getan: Beim ersten deutschsprachigen Community-Treffen dieses Jahres in Berlin.

Zu Gast waren wir bei Endocode in Berlin-Mitte, die uns in ihrem Büro nicht nur mit Internet und Strom, sondern auch mit Getränken und Pizza versorgt haben – an dieser Stelle erst einmal ein ganz herzliches Dankeschön an Lisa und Mirko für die Einladung und eure Gastfreundschaft!

Nach einer spannenden Anreise, die uns aufgrund von Stau mal wieder quer durch kleine Dörfer auf halber Strecke nach Berlin geführt hat, ging’s am Freitagabend mit einem Besuch im Biergarten los – schon praktisch, wenn die Gastgeberin auch aus Bayern kommt und weiß, mit was man mich locken kann. Bei schönstem Wetter ließen wir uns also mit alten und neuen Freunden das Bier schmecken und konnten den lauen Sommerabend genießen. Berlin ist ja ohnehin immer eine Reise wert und mit guten Freunden macht’s gleich doppelt so viel Spaß!

Am nächsten Tag ging’s dann direkt ans Eingemachte – auf der Agenda stand neben der Gewinnung neuer Community-Mitglieder auch die Vorstellung von LibreOffice Online, der Version der freien Office-Suite, die direkt im Browser läuft.

Beim Community-Thema stellten wir schnell fest, dass eine ganze Vielfalt an Fragestellungen auftaucht, die sich gar nicht in einem Wochenende beantworten lassen: Welche Veranstaltungen lohnen sich, und auf welche können wir eher verzichten? Wie geht man am besten an den Bildungsbereich heran, um Schüler und Lehrer für freie Software zu begeistern? Und welche Schnittstellen und Entscheidungswege gibt es eigentlich in einem Open-Source-Projekt samt Stiftung?

Mit diesen und anderen Fragestellungen im Gepäck bildeten sich schnell verschiedene Arbeitsgruppen, die die Essenz dieser Themen herausarbeiteten. Dank Teilnehmern von anderen Open-Source-Projekten wie Wikipedia stellten wir zudem schnell fest, dass die Fragen und Probleme sich häufig überschneiden und gar nicht so sehr vom konkreten Projekt, dessen Größe oder der Finanzierung abhängt, wie man vielleicht denken mag. Geteiltes Leid ist halbes Leid und man muss das Rad auch nicht ständig neu erfinden – so stand dann schnell fest, dass wir künftig die projektübergreifende Zusammenarbeit noch verstärken sollten, um uns mit unseren Kolleginnen und Kollegen aus anderen Organisationen regelmäßig auszutauschen, denn ein Patentrezept zur Lösung hatte niemand im Gepäck.

Ein Ansatz ist mit Sicherheit, die Mitmachseiten noch zu verbessern und zu vereinfachen, um interessierte Neulinge leichter an die Hand zu nehmen. In eine ähnliche Richtung geht auch die Überlegung, dass wir die internen Tools des Projekts wie Wiki, Dateiablage, Kalender und dergleichen mehr verbessern müssen – für die alten Hasen sind diese zwar verständlich, können gerade für Neulinge jedoch zu einer großen Hürde werden, wenn nicht so recht klar ist, wohin genau beispielsweise Bildungsmaterialien gepackt werden sollen.

Schon auf den Weg gebracht ist eine Umfrage zu LibreOffice, die wir zum einen intern als Referenz benutzen möchten, zum anderen ähnlich anderer bekannter Surveys der Allgemeinheit zur Verfügung stellen wollen – durch unsere internationale Community können die Fragen übersetzt und dann an verschiedenen Stellen gestellt werden, beispielsweise nach dem Download.

Festgestellt haben wir ebenfalls, dass im deutschsprachigen Projekt zwar viele Personen aktiv sind und wir auch regelmäßig viele Menschen auf den Community-Wochenenden treffen, die dauerhafte Vernetzung und gemeinsamte Koordination aber ausbaufähig ist. Das ist nicht nur bei uns in Deutschland ein Thema, auch international gibt es unglaublich aktive Communities, beispielsweise in Japan, von denen wir eigentlich viel zu wenig wissen – das sollten wir ändern. Ein Problem dabei ist, dass viele der Aktiven mittlerweile stark im internationalen Projekt gebunden sind und viele bereits zahlreiche Aufgaben und Verpflichtungen haben, die unter einen Hut zu bringen sind. Auch mein Arbeitsalltag dreht sich um viele andere Themen, die nur etwas Luft lassen – doch das geht letztlich jedem so.

Gerade im Hinblick auf die Möglichkeit, bei regelmäßig geleisteten Arbeitsbeiträgen kostenlos Mitglied im Kuratorium der Stiftung zu werden und somit beispielsweise auch bei den in diesem Herbst anstehenden Vorstandswahlen mitwirken und die künftige Strategie mitbestimmen zu können, wollen wir diese Möglichkeiten in Zukunft noch deutlich stärker bewerben – der meritokratische Ansatz ist ja eine der Errungenschaften unserer Satzung schlechthin und ich würde mich freuen, wenn wir auch weiter mit dem ein oder anderen Vertreter der deutschsprachigen Community mit an Bo(a)rd wären.

Ein Thema, das Ansporn sein könnte, ist die Möglichkeit, LibreOffice auch im Browser zum gemeinsamen Bearbeiten von Dokumenten zu nutzen – dem zweiten Teil unserer Agenda. Hier kann ich selbst gar nicht so sehr ins Detail gehen, bin mir aber sicher, dass das in den Blogpostings meiner technisch versierten Kollegen noch tiefgehender abgedeckt wird. Spannend zu sehen war das Ganze allemal. Die Installation ist zwar (noch) nicht trivial, benötigt es doch neben der Online-Instanz auch eine Anbindung an Datei- und Benutzerverwaltung, doch ist alles einmal installiert, lässt sich im Browser durchaus angenehm damit arbeiten. Ich bin sehr gespannt, wie die Entwicklung hier weitergeht – mittelfristig wird die Cloud-Variante meiner Meinung nach die Desktop-Version hervorragend ergänzen.

Was hab‘ ich abgesehen von einem interessanten Einblick in LibreOffice Online aus dem Wochenende für mich persönlich sonst noch mitgenommen? Neben einer guten Zeit mit vielen guten Freunden auch eine ganze Menge für den Arbeitsalltag: In Zukunft wollen wir wieder verstärkt lokale Veranstaltungen organisieren – jeder an den Orten und zu den Themen, die er am besten beherrscht, konkret standen beispielsweise Schulen in NRW zur Diskussion. Ich kann mir gut vorstellen, demnächst etwas im Allgäu oder in München zu organisieren, oder vielleicht ja sogar in Kaufbeuren, meiner Heimatstadt? Über lokale Mitstreiter freu ich mich immer!

Im September beginnt hier in Bayern ein neues Schuljahr, die Vorlesungen an den Unis starten im Oktober – genug Zeit also, um den Sommer über Ideen zu schmieden und diese dann umzusetzen…

Mir hat’s großen Spaß gemacht, ich fand das Treffen sehr konstruktiv und ergiebig und ich freu mich auf ein Wiedersehen beim nächsten Community-Treffen, das wir künftig zwei Mal im Jahr abhalten wollen, jeweils an wechselnden Orten.

Vielen herzlichen Dank nochmal an das Team von Endocode, insbesondere Lisa und Mirko, für die herzliche Einladung und die Gastfreundschaft – es war toll bei euch! Herzlichen Dank auch an alle, die den teils weiten Weg nach Berlin auf sich genommen haben, um sich zu treffen, auszutauschen und ihren Beitrag für die Community zu leisten – nur durch Leute wie euch, die sich einbringen und engagieren, ist LibreOffice zu dem geworden, was es heute ist und es freut mich sehr, so viele engagierte und motivierte Leute zu meinen Freunden und Kollegen zählen zu dürfen. Ich freu mich aufs nächste Mal!

Unused features blur the focus of LibreOffice, and maintaining legacy capabilities is difficult and error-prone. The engineering steering committee (ESC) collected some ideas of what features could be flagged as deprecated in the next release – 5.4 – with the plan to remove them later.…

The post Results from the Survey about LibreOffice Features appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

Java has the Duke, SUSE is known for its Geeko, KDE is going with Konqui, Krita welcomes you with Kiki, and Mozilla frightens the user with a Tyrannosaurus Rex. All major applications are known by a mascot.…

The post Competition for a LibreOffice Mascot appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

We have just released Beast version 0.11.0: Beast 0.11.0 Announcement

The announcement gives a high level overview of the changes (Soundfont support, multi threaded signal processing, new packaging, etc) and links to all the details like NEWS, tarballs, the binary package and shortlogs.

In this post, I’d like to extend a bit on where we’re going next. Beast has come a long way from its first lines of code drafted in 1996 and has seen long periods of inactivity due to numerous personal reasons on my part and also Stefan’s. I can’t begin to describe how much the Beast project owes to Stefan’s involvement, development really thrives whenever he manages to put some weight behind the project. He’s initiated major shifts in the project, contributed lots of demos, instruments and of course code.

Lately we were able to devote some time to Beast again, and with that reformulated its future directions. One important change was packaging, which already made it into the 0.11.0 release. This allows us to provide an easily installable binary package that extracts into /opt/. It’s available as a DEB for now, and we hope other package formats will follow.

Another major area of change that I’m working on behind the scenes is the UI technology. The current UI has huge deficits and lacks in workflow optimizations compared to other DAWs. Stefan has several big improvements planned for the workflow as do I, but in the past Gtk+ has not been helping with making those changes easy. Rapicorn was one attempt at fixing that, and while in theory it can provide a lot more flexibility in shaping the UI, based on concise declarations and use of SVG elements, it is still far away from reaching the degree of flexibility needed for our plans.

So far indeed, that I’ve had to seriously reconsider the approach and look for alternatives. Incidentally, the vast majority of feature needs and ideas I’ve had for the toolkit area appear to already be readily accessible through web technologies that have impressively advanced in the last few years.

Though we’re not planning to move Beast into an online application, we can still leverage these technologies through the electron project, which is an open source project providing HTML & CSS rendering plus Javascript on the desktop using libchromiumcontent from Google Chrome.

In my eyes it makes little sense to replicate much of the W3C specified features in desktop toolkits like Gtk+, Qt, Rapicorn which are much lesser staffed than the major browser projects, especially if we have a way to utilize recent browser improvements on the desktop.

So in effect I’ve changed plans for Beast’s future UI technology and started to construct a new interface based on web technologies running in electron. It’s interesting to change desktop UI development like this to say the least, and I’m curious about how long it takes to get up to par with current Gtk+ Beast functionality. I have some ideas how to address real time display of volume and frequency meters, but I’m still unsure how to best tackle large track view / clip view displays with wide scrolling and zooming ranges, given the choice between DOM elements and an HTML5 canvas.

Apart from the UI, we have several sound Library improvements pending integration. Stefan wants to finally complete Jack driver support, and as always there are some interesting plugin implementations in the queue that are awaiting completion.

If you want to help with any of the development steps outlined or just track Beast’s evolution, you can join our mailing list. Although the occasional face to face meeting helps us with setting development directions, we’re doing our best with keeping everything documented and open for discussions on the list.

UPDATE: Stefan just released his first Beast screencast: Walkthrough: making music with BEAST 0.11.0

As you know I often publish things how good Microsoft office adheres to it’s own standard.

It should be known that LibreOffice needs to produce non-conform OOXML (docx,xlsx etc.) files to be able to open files created with Microsoft Word.

This time linking to the commit message of one of our developers as a proof

I compiled and run LibreOffice Online again, the version of LibreOffice that runs inside the browser with the option of collaborative editing.

I’m finally ready to announce LibreOffice daily builds for Linux that integrate our new automatic updater. The work on the automatic updater has been going on for nearly a year now and is finally in a shape that we produce builds on TDF hardware that will automatically update using delta updates.

The current builds are 64-bit Linux builds created on SLES 12.2 and should run on most Linux distros. These builds are .tar.gz based archives that you can extract and just run. Note that we can’t update builds that are placed into locations that are not writeable by the current user (and due to missing support for signing executables and libraries on Linux there are no plans to change that).

Below you will find a short summary how the updating works and some of my open items until this feature can be shipped in release builds (hopefully already in the next major release). If you are not interested in the technical details, head to the daily builds directory and download the build (currently the only way to see that an update happened is through the version string in About dialog but future builds will open my test wiki page after a successful build).

Technical details

Our updater code is heavily based on the Mozilla updater code and was initially imported into the LibreOffice build system as part of GSoC 2015.

The update files are called mar files and contain bzip2 compressed update files. In addition to the update files (either complete or delta updates) mar files also contain signatures, version info and update channel information. We currently only use the signature support to ensure that the update files are valid LibreOffice update files produced by us and the version info to make sure that nobody can do a downgrade.

The update process is currently a two step process but I might change this to single step process later. The first step currently contacts our update server that knows about all available updater enabled builds and will tell the LibreOffice instance which update files to use and provide some additional information. Based on the response the LibreOffice instance will download the update file, verify that the file is correct (file size and hash), copy the existing installation and apply the update in the update directory. After the update has been applied the first stage is complete and we need to wait until the next start to replace the running LibreOffice instance with the freshly updated one. During the next start the updated build in the update directory replaces the existing installation.

We currently use a two step process to ensure that we are not blocking the user too long as downloading a complete update file can take several minutes (about 200 MB compared to around 2 MB for my current delta files) and ensuring that if one of the steps fails we still have a working build. However, anyone who has ever developed complex code on Windows knows that Windows prohibits access to files that are already open by another process. Therefore this approach does not work on Windows and I think the two step process has some potential for user profile corruption if the user profile is stored in the installation directory (e.g. by default in our archive based builds). The long term plan is currently to switch to an update process that first downloads the update file and during the next start applies the update in-place. This approach would work on Windows and should avoid all potentials for user profile corruptions.

Another huge problem of the automatic updater is how to handle the case that the user can not write to the installation directory (e.g. installed as a normal application on Windows). Mozilla handles this case on Windows through an additional updater service that elevates the privileges of the updater process. Currently my plan is to use the same concept for LibreOffice and the code for the updater service already compiles successfully on Windows. Using such a service requires us to make sure that the service can not be used by any executable that is not produced by the LibreOffice team which requires signatures checks during each step. As I could not find a way to reliably sign executables and libraries on Linux there is currently no supported planned for this feature outside of Windows.

The updater seems to work reliably on Linux already and many of the basic features that I have on my list are already implemented. Currently the one remaining feature that I still need to implement for all platforms is some form of an UI. The larger task is to get the updater working well on Windows, including the updater service and the MSI integration through MSP updates. In addition, I would like to implement some automatic tests that make sure that updates work and that updated builds and freshly installed builds are identical.

If you want to help with the work on improving the automatic updater and making it available in our next major release please talk to me. A good starting point might be tdf#108563, a simple easy hack in the online updater code.

As always I have to thank all developers working on LibreOffice, the TDF infrastructure team which provides all the services that are used to produce the builds and especially the Mozilla team for providing an awesome solution as open source that we can easily integrate.

Woah, Google Summer of Code with LibreOffice ( x2 ). This time, I’ll be working on improvement and rework of Special Characters feature in LibreOffice and adding some enhancements to it. I will be mentored by Samuel Mehrbrodt, Thorsten Behrens, and Heiko Tietze. I’ll encapsulate all the proposed changes with respect to the project in this blog.

The Idea

• Create a way to quickly re-use recently-picked special characters, allowing the user to search in the whole character map, which has no filter to narrow down results.
• Allow users to create their own ‘Special Characters’ subset (Individualization)
• Sorting by last in, first out; items from the list of recently used characters are sorted to the beginning if selected.
• Create a toolbar dropdown control to easily access recent symbols and the user-defined custom subset.
• Have a preview along with the Unicode name.
• Better UI for search (within font subsets) using Unicode name, hex and decimal code.
• Different subsets within a font need a separation in the special character SvxShowCharSet custom widget.

Finalized enhancements for the dialog

Proposal for the toolbar dropdown for quick access to favorites and recently used characters.

Design for the toolbar dropdown.

A lot of challenges need to be addressed while working on this project. It’s about time to play with Unicode data and custom-widgets.

For other queries and discussions, please comment or ping me (IRC nick: Akki) on libreoffice-dev / libreoffice-design channel on Freenode.

Due to its long history, LibreOffice has accumulated a staggering amount of features. Maintaining these features is not free, and having a massive amount of features may blur the focus of the software. In order to steer the development and to focus on the more important aspects we prepared a survey that investigates how often some features are used.…

The post Survey on LibreOffice features appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

We asked recently for branding proposals for the upcoming release of LibreOffice. The task was also announced on the job board of the Open Source Design group and we got a couple of replies on their discourse forums. Below you we show the motifs embedded in the splash screen.…

The post What motif for the next release do you prefer? appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.