One of the outcome of the meeting in Oslo was to take the final decision on the KOffice 2.2 release schedule. Following the current trend of a six months release schedule, therefor the 2.2 RC1 is planned for April, 27th 2010.

We have also decided to experiment with a shorter release schedule for 2.3, which is likely to happen four months after 2.2. This will be made possible with the use of Git, and if we manage to keep the release branch in a releasable state at all time, meaning no tests failures, and that features are only merged when finished.

Last weekend I have been attending the KOffice Sprint is Oslo. Like every other KOffice sprint it was really cool and we had lots of fun. It was the first time I visited Norway and I really liked it. Unfortunately these sprints are always so busy that you don’t really see much outside the office. I arrived friday night at the airport, where I met Jos and Jos. During the travel to the city I could try the new N900, which is really a cool device.

On saturday we had lots of interesting discussions about the lots of stuff. In contrast to the previous meetings many different things that are not directly technical issues in KOffice have been dicussed like the impending move to Git, release schedules, decision-making and the involvement of Nokia. Nokias testers did a huge amount of testing and I’m really looking forward to the development that will be done for KOffice 2.2. I got a N810 from Nokia and we had a lottery with five N900 as six month loan after dinner.

Back at the hotel we had a Krita meeting, where we discussed the plans for Krita 2.2. For 2.2 we are mainly focusing on stability and performance with the midterm goal to get Krita ready for the next Blender open movie. To reach this goal we are running a fundraiser to get Lukáš Tvrdý, famous brush wizard of Krita, working full time on Krita for three months to improve performance, stability and usability. See more information is available on the Krita website.

On sunday morning we had a discussion about getting KOffice end user ready. There is much to do to and even though it’s remarkable what this small group of developers achieves we still need more developers. So in case you want to help making KOffice ready don’t hesitate to drop by on IRC or the mailing list and we will get something for you.

Big thanks go to Nokia, KDE e.V. and the organizers of this great sprint for providing the location, devices, food, accommodation and everything else that made this sprint such a great experience.

People are almost already gone, or are about to leave (myself I am leaving the office in an hour or so). The office is getting empty, the discussion are fading away. But today, started by a presentation from Jos of strigi fame on a metadata project for KWord and KOffice, and a proof of concept implementations of ODF 1.2 metadata, and how to use nepomuk. This trigger a discussion between him and Pierre on a design that could work for change tracking and metadata in the KOffice text library.

The last main topic was about making KOffice ready for end-users. And we decided to define a few use cases with an associated users for each application. And then list the features they need, and what kind of issues they face. While Krita is getting focused on being useful for the artist behind Blender movies. Of course, the biggest challenge is now to find developers resources to implement all this ideas and fixes.

This was the last topic on the general session. Afterward hacking started again, as well as specific discussion between a small group of developers. For instance, the Krita team (or what was left of it after the departure of Dmitry) started a discussion on redesigning our painting operation settings, which are currently a bit messy between GUI elements, and settings used for painting.

And now people are either gone, compiling KOffice on windows or almost asleep.

After a short night (for my taste anyway) we had and ok breakfast at around 8 o’clock in the morning at the hotel. After that we gathered together, bought tickets for the public transport and went to the Nokia offices. There we’ve settled in a conference room in the 6th floor where the sales and managing people have their offices. The actual engineers are sitting a floor below where we are not supposed be. But there is enough space here anyway so that is not a problem.

Then we started to have some presenatations and diskussions on various topics like library reorganization, moving to git, a nice presentation from Suresh about Nokias effort to build the office viewer application for the N900 and an also nice presentation from Olivier about library design and source/binary compatibility.

For lunch we had some selfmade sandwiches at the cafeteria, using food bought by Thomas before. Soda and coffee/hot chocolate was also free to take so that was taken care of also. In the cafeteria there is also a table tennis table where some people tested their skills. I also did that and had a very nice game with Inge which is a very capable player table tennis player.

After lunch we had some more disussions/presentations and then some people already started to hack away at their stuff.

In the evening at around 6 o’clock went out for dinner at a nearby pizza shop. We had to wait a couple of minutes though as we were quite a lot of people which did not had place all at once first. But after some short time we got a couple of tables were all people fitted in. We decided to order a couple of huge pizzas. Nokia kindly paid for the food and the non-alocoholic drinks again. Thanks a lot!

After dinner people went back to the office to get their stuff, some people went off to a pub, others were going back to the hotel where a Krita coem together took place.

All in all it was a very densily packed day with lots of information to process and lots of fun too.

Yesterday was the first day of the meeting, we had a lot of discussions going on. It started with the move to git, when, what and how ? We decided for a list blocker, and to do the conversion as soon as this blockers were solve, this include solving some of the issues that KDE face for the conversion.

Then we decided to have the 2.2 release on a six monthes schedule, with a release in May, and to experiment a short 4 monthes schedule for 2.3. To be efficient such a schedule require a move to Git, and the ability to work on different branches and only merge what is ready. The main objection to such a schedule was whether it is not too many releases for end users, the advantage is that we solve the problem of schedules alignment with distributions.

Then we had a presentation from the Nokia guys on their work on an Office viewer for Maemo, what they achieved and what they need to have fixed (just 600 bugs…) to consider it end-user ready. And then we talk on how to integrate their work in the community.

Then we went for sandwiches at the Nokia cafeteria.

We started the afternoon with a discussion on how to improve decision making inside the community. The important thing is that we want to take decisions based on a concensus, which require to have people working on finding a solution instead of defending their current solution. But in the end, if there is still a disagreement, we decided that shared component (library and base plugins) would have three maintainers that take the final decision.

In the afternoon, Olivier Goffart gave a presentation on library design, which is interesting since we are planning to export some of our libraries and offer API/ABI stability.

Then we had hacking times, with people fixing bugs, talking design and other discussing on our library organisation.

Then we were invited by Nokia for a pizza party at a nearby restaurant. And concluded the evening with a Krita meeting in the lobby of the hotel.

I arrived at the airport at around one o’clock and waited half an hour for Dmitry who arrived only half an hour later. We took the express train to the city and went straight to the hotel. Checked in, dumped our belongings in the hotel room and then we were off to do some sighseeing of Oslo.

Great things is that almost all the sighseeing highlights of the city are in walking distance, so we had seen most of them. Bad things was darkness arrived early so at four o’clock in the afternoon it was almost dark. But then the city was nicely lightened so we did some nice photos. At the city hall there was a small christmas market were we had something hot to drink and eat a german style sausage (“Bratwurst”) which was sold there at a german market stall.

Then we want back to the hotel waiting for Thomas to notify us where to meet for dinner. It turned out to be a chinese restaurant “Taste of China” were we finally met all the other guys and gals attending the sprint at the weekend.

After dinner we planned to go to a pub but then almost all people wanted to go back to the hotel and Thomas and Olivier wanting to go to a concert. So only four people ended up at the pub. I had two beers which costed a fortune, but it was quite ok there anyway.

Later back to the hotel, we met Jos and Jos and Sven Langkamp. The later I share the hotel room with. Up in the hotel room we noticed that there was very loud music palying on the street which made it quite difficult to get to sleep. Fortunately i brought a pair of ear plugs with me, so I got around that.

So I have arrived in Oslo for the KOffice Sprint. We are gathering in the Trolltech headquarter, currently waiting for people to arrive before going to have dinner in the center. Casual discussions have already started about moving to git, about network issues, graphical user interface, distribution flameware. And also doing some hacking.

The topic of the meeting is mostly about finalizing the KOffice libraries, with API reviews with Qt Developers, probably some bug fixing and unit testing. As well as a few “administrative” discussion, like release schedules.

6 meses después de la publicación de la versión 2.0, el equipo de KOffice ha presentado la versión 2.1, centrada en mejorar las novedades incorporadas en la anterior versión e incorporar algunas nuevas.

Puede que aún no sea una suite ofimática capaz de sustituir al OpenOffice o al MS Office, pero una cosa está clara, al ritmo que está mejorando muy pronto se pondrá a la misma altura. Sin duda, una suite ofimática a la que prestar mucha atención y que además es multiplataforma.

Descarga | KOffice 2.1

+ Releases Notes

Yesterday, we released KOffice 2.1, the first major release in the 2.x cycle. It brings many improvements over 2.0, providing a much more stable and rich full experience, you can read more details in the 2.1 release announcement.

While 2.0 was clearly a developer release for developer, and for testing. For 2.1, we concentrated on fixing bugs, fixing some of the annoying issues, 2.1 is coming with many improvements in the MS Office filters, but 2.1 is still lacking in many area, for instance 2.1 comes with experimental support for displaying tables and formulas, but there is no support for editing them. Also there are still many rough edge in the UI. But the progress from 2.0 are astonishing, helped by the good base libraries (Qt, KDE and koffice), external help (Kevin Otten’s student and now Nokia).

While, in general, KOffice 2.1 is still not recommended for end-users. There are two exceptions, the first one is Karbon, while far to be feature full, is starting to become a very capable vector drawing editor, in 2.1 it get support for filters (only blur in 2.1, more is coming for 2.2). I personally use it a lot these days to create illustration for my thesis work. And Krita has made big progress in stability, with dozens of crash fixes for 2.1, and also include many of the new fun painting operation from Lukas, improvement in brush dynamic, recording of filters to create macro…

A while ago, in a praise of karbon 2.0 I wrote, someone commented on the “lack” of tools in karbon, as opposed to inkscape. And from forum posts, or identi.ca, it seems to cause some confusions. For instance, there is no rectangle or circle tool in karbon. And there will never be. The reason is that for KOffice 2, the tools are meant for user interraction, and for manipulating object in the canvas. Inserting shapes is done through the “Add shape” docker, which allow to manager your collection of customs shapes, as well as standard shapes, you can then just drag and drop the shape, or select a shape and then by clicking and dragging on the canvas you can select the size of the shape like with a tool. Once the shape is on the canvas you can go to the toolbox and start having fun with your shape.

And of course, since the technology is shared, you add shapes to other KOffice application in the same way. To add a text in Krita ? Go to the add shape docker, drag and drop, and enjoy ! To add an image to your presentation in KPresenter ? Go to the add shape docker, drag and drop, and enjoy ! To add a smiley to KWord… you get it !

For quite some time I have been wondering what’s wrong with font rendering in KWord. I have seen KWord on other systems where the fonts rendering looked nice and sharp, but I couldn’t get the same look at my own system. The screenshot below shows how that looked.

The topic was discussed in the KDE forum and then in the KOffice IRC channel, where I finally got the right hint. The clue is changing the hinting style in the KDE systemsettings. This requires a some experimentation to find out which mode works best.

For me the change from full hinting to no hinting brought a great improvement as you can see below. The font in menu and toolbar changes a bit too, but that doesn’t bother me that much.

Maybe it’s possible to get even better rendering by flipping some secret switches, but so far I’m quite happy with the result.

Fuente: barrapunto

«Parece que Nokia colabora activamente con KOffice y están desarrollado en conjunto una versión específica para Maemo. Lo mejor de todo es que todas las contribuciones se han hecho directamente en el SVN de KOffice y no de manera cerrada. ¡Otro gran paso para el software libre!»

Traduction de http://www.koffice.org/news/office-viewer-for-maemo5-based-on-koffice/

KOffice2 intègre un grand nombre d’outils bureautiques. Nous avons publié la version 2.0, version “plateforme”, il y a tout juste trois mois et nous travaillons continuellement pour rendre la suite plus stable et proposer les outils minimums que les utilisateurs attendent.

Tous les membres de la communauté KOffice fournissent un effort continuel, traduit par de nombreux bogues corrigés et plein de nouveautés dans toutes les applications. En d’autres termes, la version 2.1 sera bien plus adaptée au grand public.

Nous avons récemment obtenu un petit coup de pouce. Nokia a packagé KOffice pour l’environnement Maemo 5 avec une nouvelle interface graphique, ce qui signifie que KOffice peut fonctionner sur le nouvel appareil Maemo (N900). Pour être clair, ce n’est pas un produit commercial de Maemo mais une contribution de Nokia à l’Open Source. L’application développée sera disponible au téléchargement selon notre cycle de “release-early release often” (NdT publiez tôt, publiez souvent). Les bogues existeront pareillement sur les deux versions.

C’est une excellente nouvelle que KOffice soit disponible pour le grand public, par ailleurs Nokia nous a aidé à corriger certains bogues et à améliorer le support du format MS-Office.

Nokia a donc créé un afficheur de documents pour la plateforme Maemo 5 (Freemantle) à partir de KOffice en utilisant les applications KWord et KPresenter pour afficher des documents et des présentations. L’afficheur utilise une interface spécifique adaptée au style de Maemo 5. Un des objectifs est d’aider KOffice à rendre l’ouverture et l’affichage de documents au format MS-Office plus mature.

Il est important de noter que toutes les contributions à KOffice ont été directement intégrées au dépôt subversion. L’afficheur de documents KOffice pour Maemo sera présenté pour la première fois au Maemo Submit à Amsterdam entre le 9 et le 11 octobre. Cette publication n’intervient pas au meilleur moment car le calendrier de la version 2.1 souffrira d’une ou deux semaines de retard, obligeant Freemantle à utiliser la version RC dans un premier temps.

Je trouve excitant que le long travail fournit par la communauté soit récompensé par un afficheur de documents utilisant KOffice. Je suis reconnaissant de pouvoir travailler sur le projet et j’espère que cette coopération entre Nokia et la communauté KOffice continuera.

if your koffice applications are very slow….i have an intel 945gm….
try like it said here for me has worked

As you might know Kivio, the KOffice diagramming and flowcharting application, hasn’t been released with KOffice 2.0. Since the release a lot of people asked on IRC how long it will take until Kivio will be released and what’s still missing for the release.

So what do we have so far? The current Kivio version in trunk consists of 223 lines of code. On the screenshot below you can see how it looks at the moment (with my own docker placement):

Of course the small code size doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have any features. Due to the high integration between the apps and the KOffice libs most of the features of KPresenter/Karbon are already available. For example load/save, inserting and arranging shapes, managing pages etc are done. Shapes can be rotated which was really missing in 1.6. Thanks to flake all shapes can now be interchanged seamlessy between Kivio and the other KOffice apps. At the moment there is also ongoing work to improve the connection tool.

What’s missing in Kivio? Most of the work to make Kivio usefull has been done KOffice libs. What Kivio needs now are developers to fill the missing gaps. The most important missing features at the moment are stencils sets as we had them in 1.6 and support for text on shapes. Unfortunately we are all already busy with developing the other KOffice apps and day jobs, so nobody is working on this at the moment.

While most of the KDE developers enjoyed the sun and the ocean at the GCDS, KOffice people are working hard as always. Some monthes ago Cyrille our restless Krita hacker and KOffice release manager posted a patch on reviewboard which implemented a proof of concept for filter effects in flake. Unfortunately it didn’t found the attention it deserved and such got forgotten a little (I blame myself as part of this).
Luckily Cyrille added filter effects support to the feature plan of the upcoming KOffice 2.1 release, so I stumbled upon it again and decided to do something about it. So some days ago we had a nice IRC discussion about how we would tackle the problem and how we would go about implementing it in the flake library. The decision was to have filter effects as plugins which get loaded when a shape with effects gets loaded from a file or a to be written tool for editing effects is activated.
As you might have already guessed from my boring introductory text, we’ve got a first version of a filter effects plugin working. The filter effect that was choosen to be implemented is the blur effect, because it is possible the effect most used by artists.
First step was to produce a simple svg document with a blurred shape (used Inkscape for this) and to implement the stuff needed to load the filter effect and attach is to a flake shape. The seocnd step was to actually implement the filter itself and the painting of the filtered shape. The third step was to implement a tool which can add a filter effect to a shape, remove a filter effect from a shape and as well as change properties of a filter effect attached to a shape.
A filter effect plugin does provide a corresponding configuration widget which is shown inside the tools docker widget and can be used to edit the filter effect properties (see bottom right of the screenshot below). Thus the filter effects tool only has to know about the common properties of the filter effects, the custom properies are all handled via the plugin provided configuration widget.
As a reward for those reading all the way down to this paragraph I show you an actual screenshot of Karbon with blurred shapes.

What is missing still is the code to save filter effects back to svg. Also polishing of the filter effects code is still to be done. But at least it is a nice start which already produces some nice results.

Kubuntu Logo

I finally made up my mind! 

The distribution of Linux that I choose to use is Kubuntu 9.04 which is a Desktop Environment, so for those whom start using Linux after using Windows will be easier because there are similarities between the 2 OSs.

A short description from the official website:

“Kubuntu is a free, user-friendly operating system based on the K Desktop Environment and on the award winning Ubuntu operating system. With a biannual release cycle and at least 18 months of free security updates for each release, it is the secure, stable computing environment you’ve been waiting for.”

It is a very easy to use Linux os, full of effects and has everything you want and need. I actually recommend it if you like using a KDE, if you want to use gnome than Ubuntu is the perfect choice. The number of packages is very big and they are very easy and fast to install. The latest updates of the Kubuntu 9.04 are: the first update of the KOffice 2 (KOffice 2.0.1), Karmic Alpha 2 released, KDE 4.3 Beta, Amarok 2.1 and others.

After I install this Linux distribution I hope in a few days to publish the first “S.O.S.-movie”. If you want to download Kubuntu 9.04 just click here.

traduction de KOffice 2.0.1 Released

Aujourd’hui, exactement un mois après la sortie de KOffice 2.0.0, l’équipe de KOffice propose le premier correctif de la série 2.0. Cette version ne contient pas de nouveautés mais beaucoup de corrections de bogues pour quasiment tous les composants de KOffice 2.0. Nous prévoyons au moins deux autres correctifs avant de débuter la branche 2.1 au mois d’octobre.

Les détails de cette version 2.0.1 peuvent être consultés dans le changelog. Les sources sont disponibles sur http://download.kde.org/ dans pub/kde/stablekoffice-2.0.1/ sur l’un des nombreux miroirs. Cette version est traduite dans pas moins de 27 langues, soit une de plus que la précédente. La nouvelle langue de cette version est le norvégien bokmål, l’une des deux formes écrites du norvégien.

Toutes les distributions proposant les paquets pour la 2.0.0 devraient être bientôt à jour.

- traduction de Starting the 2.0 series -

Il y a à peu près trois semaines nous sortions la plate-forme KOffice 2.0.0. Cette sortie semble réussie quand je regarde les retours positifs du buzz créé sur les  intrawebs. J’ai noté quelques questions et des inquiétudes qui sont apparues auxquelles je veux répondre.

Cette version n’est pas conseillée pour les utilisateurs finaux, alors pourquoi la sortie plutôt que d’attendre qu’elle soit prête ?

En fait, nous avons marqué la version 2.0 pour les utilisateurs avancés [comprendre développeur/testeur/etc.]. KOffice a, par le passé, été un projet open-source avec un concept de “sortez tôt, sortez souvent” [release early, release often]. C’est naturel pour nous, cette stratégie fonctionne très bien. Je pense que nous devrions réaliser que ces deux dernière années l’audience open-source a changé. Quand je sortais une nouvelle version d’une application il y a dix ans, les chances qu’elle atteigne une personne autre qu’un développeur étaient vraiment faibles. Maintenant, je créé une application et quelques semaines plus tard, des utilisateurs qui n’ont probablement jamais tapé la moindre ligne de commande peuvent l’utiliser.

Naturellement, c’est une grande avancée. Personnellement j’adore que mes logiciels touchent un public plus large. D’un autre côté, le concept de sortez tôt, sortez souvent induit un décalage entre ce qui est disponible et ce que les gens en attendent.

Nous sortons KOffice 2.0 parce que nous avons de quoi, c’est une façon de procéder qui a fait ses preuves en efficacité. Les enthousiastes sont encouragés à tester cette version et à nous dire ce qu’ils en pensent pour nous aider à l’améliorer. Ceux qui ne préfèrent pas vivre dangereusement (sic) avec leurs logiciels peuvent attendre une version plus adaptée.

Qu’est ce qu’une version “plateforme” ?

KOffice2 offre une nouvelle approche des composants de bureautique. J’écrirai un billet plus complet prochainement. Le concept à retenir de KOffice2 est son approche orientée composant. Nous avons, par exemple, un composant de traitement de texte qui est le même pour toutes les applications de KOffice2. Ce système de composants nécessite une base solide, une plateforme pour ainsi dire. Nous invitons les développeurs tiers et les utilisateurs curieux à regarder comment cette plateforme permet, non seulement la bureautique classique, mais surtout des usages innovants à mettre en avant pour KOffice 2.0.

Plus précisément, nous proposons des concepts comme le plugin Kids Office qui montre aux intégrateurs et aux distributions une preuve que KOffice peut être grandement adapté. Le message est clair : les compagnies qui distribuent et vendent des logiciels open-source ont maintenant une nouvelle option à considérer pour leurs clients. Nous avons la conviction que cela représente beaucoup de potentiel pour eux.

Quand est-ce que l’utilisateur final pourra l’utiliser ?

KOffice 2.0 est une version stable. Les fonctionnalités présentes devraient être fiables (pas de crash, etc.). Dans les faits, la version 2.0 possède déjà tout un lot de fonctionnalités que les autres suites n’ont pas. Dans le même temps beaucoup de fonctions qui sont attendues d’une suite bureautique sont manquantes.

En clair, cela dépend. Si vos besoins en bureautiques sont faibles, vous pourriez apprécier la version 2.0. Sinon nous vous suggérons d’attendre la 2.1 voire la 2.2.

As you might have seen on the dot, I took part in the ODF Plugfest in The Hague last week. The goal of the workshop was to improve interoperability between the different ODF implementations. All of the big vendors like Sun, Microsoft, IBM or Google, lots of smaller ones and open source projects like KOffice and Abiword attended.

It was first time I was going to such a workshop and I had expected that there would be fights between the different vendors like it happened in some blogs before the workshop. It was a pleasant surprise for me that the athmosphere was very friendly and productive. It was really nice to meet other people projects/companys, put the competition aside for some time, work and drink some beer together.

There were many interesting details in the talks for example there was a proposal get OpenFormula out once it’s finished to be available for ODF 1.1 before ODF 1.2 is completely approved. Other important things were that there is much interest to get more SVG functionality into ODF, to have a consistent documentation of different implementations and of course Officeshots. Officeshots is a very important tool, as it allows to test documents with many different implementations on many different platforms. The only downside is that MS Office not available on Officeshots at the moment.

The interoperability testing in the afternoon was interesting. Everyone was sitting around a big round table and exchanged documents to test it in other apps. Here you can see how that looked like on tuesday (Photo by Doug Mahugh):

Over the two days many interoperability problems were found. One interesting issue we discussed on monday was a problems with some text appearing on the slide master in a presentation, a problem about that I wrote some time ago. What made this problem special that it’s probably the first problem that involves KOffice, OpenOffice and MS Office at the same time. A solution for the problem is currently investigated. In general the testing showed there is still a long way to go for everyone to get good interoperability.

Interestingly KOffice was pretty well-kown by the audience. I got many questions about the KOffice Windows port, unfortunately the windows packages lag a bit behind. We gained lots of test documents from the testing and have started to look into the issues. One problem when loading of embedded charts in files from MS Office has already been fixed.

Last but not least, I want to thank Michiel Leenaars, Fabrice Mous and everyone who organized this workshop. It was really great and I hope it will be repeated soon.