OpenOffice.org: KDE Integration Project Launched

vfs writes "Someone at pclinuxonline.com noticed that a OpenOffice/KDE Integration Project has been started to "provide tight (but optional) integration of the OpenOffice.org to the KDE environment beginning with KDE look and feel and ending with KDE data sources." This could offer a great opportunity for enterprises to deploy an integrated, unified desktop." (Here's the dot.kde.org post on the project.)

Comments

Qt?

[Otter]

Details are sketchy -- obviously, since no code has been written except for the cuckooo kpart -- but:

I wonder if they're planning to do a pure Qt interface, as seems to be suggested in some places, or a KDE one? From the Mac point of view, pure Qt means a native OS X interface! The native Mac KDE seems to have stalled (nothing on their mailing list for weeks) and would require extra libs even if it were made to work.

Re:Qt?

[Haeleth]

I don't think you quite understand the point. OOo on Windows already has a perfectly good interface that looks pretty close to the native look and feel, uses the native save/load dialogs, and so on. OOo on MacOS X is currently an X11 application, and as such doesn't integrate at all - it uses X11 save/load dialogs, uses X11 grey menus attached to the windows instead of the Mac's unified screen-top menubar, uses X11 widgets, and so on.

A build of OOo with a Qt option would therefore mean a lot to MacOS X users, since it would provide them with something that looked like a MacOS X application. Meanwhile, Windows users could continue to use their Windows-like build. They would lose nothing, and Mac users would gain a lot. What's the problem with that?

KOffice

[Ianoo]

I, for one, am glad they're admitting that KOffice is simply not mature enough for prime-time. No offense to the KOffice developers, I'm sure they are all far better programmers than I am and I'm sure they work hard on their project - but every time I use the suite it seems to crash for various reasons, which is not a good thing if I'm trying to work on a document and haven't been saving it every five minutes.

Maybe in a few years KOffice will be more mature and then all the KDE people can use it, but until then OpenOffice with tighter KDE integration seems like a fairly good idea. I don't care whether they recode the whole interface in QT or not, but maybe a Ximian-like tweaking to integrate the suite with KDE's VFS, printing system and open/save dialogs plus some KDE-ish toolbar buttons (it already can take on QT's colourscheme IIRC) would be more-or-less sufficent. If they want to take it further, of course, then that'd be even better.

Native Mac OS X port

[xyrw]

This could accelerate a native Mac port, since Qt has been ported to Mac OS X.

Look'n'feel

[Nucleon500]

Finally! OO.org's toolkit has always bugged me - it's kinda slow, never looks like anything else, and menus don't go away when you click on the titlebar. Besides, having yet another toolkit increases the load time and memory requirements. One of the goals seems to be a Qt backend for VCL, and eventually a new widget set might be used.

Of course, the big question is, which one. What are your favorites, people? I like the idea of wxWindows, though I wish it had a Qt port. In the long run, I'd rather see something like X but with server-side widgets, and I think wxWindows might be easiest to adapt to this model. In the short term, Qt or GTK would be great.

Yes, you are

[Feztaa]

Integrating OOo into KDE will be awesome, it will provide for greater consistency between applications, and there will simply be one less reason for people to complain about all the inconsistent GUI toolkits on Linux.

Now, all we need is a rewrite of Mozilla in Qt... :)

Re:Am I the only one

[pr0c]

"Kethinov: Am I the only one who sees this as a waste of time? KDE already works. OO.org already works. OO.org already works in KDE. All this time spent on making it look better could be used in giving Linux some real features that it really needs."

Exactly the thinking that costs us linux users. Working isn't good enough, windows 'works'. We need shit that goes above and beyond if we want to grow.

Re:Rewrite OOo in XUL

[Feztaa]

rewrite OOo into XUL/XPCOM/Gecko?

Brilliant!

You know, I've always thought that OpenOffice wasn't slow enough, but I could never think of a decent way to make it slower. You've really hit the nail on the head, though: We can add another abstraction layer to the code!

Seriously, though, I think OOo is already big and slow enough, it needs to become faster, not more bloated. The idea of rewriting OOo's interface in XUL (which is basically XML + javascript) makes me shudder.