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LibreOffice Going Online and Mobile
itwbennett writes "News from the LibreOffice Conference in Paris is trickling out. Blogger Brian Proffitt has a roundup of the conference announcements thus far. Notably included are plans for a browser-based version of LibreOffice called LibreOffice Online; and ports of LibreOffice to the Android and iOS platforms."
Or they could just make the desktop version not suck and do something about its terrible interface.
Would that be hosted with cloud storage? If not, I'm not sure what the benefit would be. If it will be, then who will be carrying the tab?
If Libreoffice is ported to Android, then it will become more visible. This will help Libreoffice step out of Openoffices shadow.
This is exactly what they need. Otherwise, Google Docs and Office 365 might end up making LibreOffice irrelevent.
It's port needs to be on par, if not directly file compatible w/ Excel and other Office programs. In other words, one should be able to do on their spreadsheet exactly what one can do in Excel - formulas, pivot tables, autofills and so on. Similarly, in their presentation programs, one should be able to make good use of special effects. An Access like database in the package would also be good.
It's not always just the license it's under, or merely the ports that exist
sorry to others but OO did suck, and unusable for instance when setting up the margins your told to use that styles thingy which has never laid out the header correctly and never will. I have visited this open office on and off for years and they never fixed such a simple thing that has kept an untold number of students from working with it. if the school says the lay out the paper a certain way that is what you do otherwise you no grade
It's about time we get a real document app for mobiles. I'm surprised it took them this long to announce it, but I guess they've been busy with all the other drama. I hope the web version allows collaborative document creation/editing as well, otherwise, I don't really see the point of pursuing BOTH of these projects.
"LibreOffice Online"... seriously? LOO?
I assume it will be accessed via a series of pipes?
NOW I am convinced that I should be using libreoffice, not openoffice.
I have recently moved 50 computers from Windows to Linux here in Thailand and the most comments I get related to the move is how much better Libreoffice is than MSO 2k7. This might have something to do with a far more simplistic interface than what 2k7 has and also the brilliant Thai translation for LO. Apart from the odd formatting issues when sharing documents between Libreoffice and MS office (usually font mismatches), it has been a successful move. I would welcome an open source mobile version of Libreoffice to use on my Galaxy Tab and Android phone.
I am a big fan of open source software
I've used both MS Office and Open/Neo Office - and my impression is that OO was about as annoying as Microsoft Office (pre-ribbon).
I think the introduction of the abomination that is the Office Ribbon has left it ahead of the game (OK, some people like the ribbon, but then I know one person who liked Windows Vista, and another who liked the Apple hockey-puck mouse...)
One possible criticism of OO/LO is that the style system, though flexible, can be a bit hard to get your head around. OTOH, there again MS have been happily screwing up the style system in Word to the point where it is now pretty unusable.
So, what's the easy-to-use but flexible opposition that LibreOffice should be competing with?
I'll concede the point that LaTeX/LyX is probably still king for technical writing, and that there are other products aimed at people writing "pure text" - but what is a good role-model in the realm of general purpose WP/DTP-crossover?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
LibreOffice Online is a bit misleading, the article is just talking about a prototype that uses the GTK Broadway with HTML5 backend to make a remote connection to LibreOffice. An impressive demo but sure but hardly the most practical.
A developer got it to compile successfully, on different hardware. There are no intereface changes and the article makes it clear they are more targeting tablets anyway than mobile devices with really small specialised interefaces. It is techincally a "port" but that is misleading and suggests a lot more than has really happened.
If you use proprietary Apple API's, I don't believe they allow you to release your source code. It wouldn't be open source. They would have to release that version closed source, which they can't do if they don't own the code.
I have used open office so If this is the 'child' of open office, I'm sure can use it comfortably.
While I would welcome an iOS version of LibreOffice some day, what I really want in the near future is a viewer for its native file formats.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
It is LGPL, so they can use their existing code as a library and write a closed source iOS UI.
Can't believe I never noticed that. Thanks for clarifying.
I was at the announcement, and I remain sceptical. This was more or less only an announcement of an intention, not an announcement of something that actually exists. Nothing was shown, and if you have followed the LibreOffice mailing lists, you have seen that so far it is only a build of the standard UI on Android. Before we will see a touch based interface, the developers will first have to separate the UI from the engine which is an enormous task.
If you want to have a free office suite on Android, I recommend starting with the Calligra suite instead. They already have two touch based interfaces (Calligra Mobile for smartphones with MeeGo and Calligra Active for tablets using Plasma Active).
I, for one, really enjoy that name. It really conveys the right feeling, as seems to be confirmed by the onslaught of the schills against it.
Disclaimer : I'm a French programmer
I know I'm talking about kinda the reverse of this story.
But is there a way to run all of Android in a browser? With apps embedded in it. So all of the apps I have installed on my Android phone I can also install on my (or someone else's) server. I'd just hit my webpage with Android and its apps embedded in the page, and use the same apps. I'd use apps that all save their state to a DB on my server (or through my server to a cloud). I could flip between phone and other machines at will.
I could use "my phone" anywhere, even when there's only wired networking (eg. inside big buildings) or where I had better/cheaper bandwidth, or a better keyboard/screen, or my battery was low. I couldn't use the phone to talk over the PSTN, but even that limit will eventually go away (Google voice, etc).
Android is a largish Java program in bytecode running on a Dalvik JVM, that was originally written in Java source and compiled to target Dalvik. Browsers have a JVM (Sun or other) that Android might be recompiled to target running on. The hard part is getting Android's hardware abstraction to map to the browser's hardware abstraction. But is it doable? Is it already done?
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make install -not war
I love LibreOffice. I hope this is competitive with Google Docs.
I've been using OfficeLibre since their release and I support their projects. Everything coming from their 3rd party progs have helped build the freeware movements.
This past week, as an English speaker, with an English OS, I had to write a five page document in French libreoffice. Should be straight-forward. It crashed four times before I figured out that pasting an image that is too big can do that, shrank the image and it was OK. Disabled the spell checking because I had no time to figure out how to add a French Dictionary, but later on, I have taken the time, here is the sad story:
My area and family are very multi-lingual (Canadian English, Canadian French, Spanish from Spain & German from Germany and Austria (depending who you are dealing with), and Russian.) LO comes out of the box English, and adding languages is hell. The method used to be one kind of hell, something with five steps and some finger crossing and dancing on certain toes, now it is a different hell. Go ahead, find the French dictionary for libreoffice on ubuntu 11.10:
-- Google for how to install dictionaries on libre office. Enjoy.
-- Go to Tools/Language ... More Languages Online... Enjoy.
-- go to Software Centre, and search for libre office or dictionaries. Enjoy.
After you have given up there. I did apt-get install libreoffice-l10n-fr and saw that there was a recommends for hunspell-fr or myspell-fr. ok... which one? tried both, noticed that one removes the other, flipped a coin and went with hunspell. so then apt-cache search, and find all the appropriate ones (hint, there is no regularity, you just have to look at the list, and pick the ones that seem ok.) and nothing happens... until you restart LO, at which point they will be there.
Sure, I can put up a web page, and explain this crap, but really... you lose 99% of people when you ask them to open a terminal. And I know it was completely different the last time I did this, about two years ago. I and understand why it is that way (independent groups, people working for free, yada, yada, yada...) I get it, I just cannot recommend the result to someone who doesn't inhale bits until 2am every morning. The result sucks for ordinary people.
Opened LO Writer, clicked "Tools/Language/More Dictionaries Online".
Clicked "Afrikaans spell checker" from the list of plugins, clicked "Get it" from the explanatory page, then "Open with Libre Office" from the popup.
My conclusion: Simple, obvious and unchallenging.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Do you realize that package is dated 2008? Did you look for any of the languages I actually mentioned, because none of them are there. You went to the list, you found the second thing in the list. Do you actually speak Africaans? My conclusion: you are an asshole who wants to show people up without actually helping.
I suspect you're trolling here.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Are you using ubuntu 11.10? It has only English installed by default. Over many years, I have done the same exercise on multiple different versions of Linux, and the other languages were never installed by default.
I keep looking... Ah, there is a writing aids section on the left. Click that. It shows me that the hunspell checker is enabled, click edit. It brings up an ''Options'' dialog, which the first field is "Language"... What that language is for, I have no idea, but it is set to English (Canada.) I set it to French (Canada) and click ok and go back to the document. I click Tools/Language/For All Text and guess what? French (Canada) isn't in the list. I have no fucking idea how to get the dictionary to be used, and I have used OOO for ten years, and linux for >20 years. a lot. I just never bothered with a spell checker. I just took it for granted that it works.
Ordinary people, one of the first things they do, is look for that. Lots of ordinary people use multiple languages. Language settings in LO (and OOO) are deeply convoluted and totally confusing.
Can we get right now the LibreOffice components to run in Android apps we write?
Embed Writer features like the text editing pane and file format import/export, and Calc features like Excel format formula calculation and at least .XLSX import/export.
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make install -not war
Why don't you try reinstalling LO? When you get to the bit where you can choose to drop multi-language support, change your setting.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
So I can document five different places in the application that ordinary people would expect to change the language of the text, but none of them actually do it. Instead they present the user with five different sets of languages/locales/etc... being installed, but because none of the lists agree, the user has no idea whether any particular language is actually installed or not.
So You may very well be right. Perhaps the languages are installed, but no mortal human will be able to find them. Even If I did as you say, and installed less than all the languagaes, which I don't recall doing months ago, but it could have happenned. It should not be this difficult to add them later.
Next... What do you mean by "default install" ?
When I say default install I mean use the packaging system, and thus the LO that came with the OS when it was installed. By default, languages are not installed. Even though LO icons are all over the unity launcher on the left, and even though writer comes up when I click on a odt document, I decided to go and check if, for some strange reason, LO is not actually installed. so I go to the Ubuntu Software Centre, I search for libreoffice, and low and behold, it offers to install it for me! Full of hope (desperation?) I click install, and authenticate, and then let it trundle for ten minutes or so. Finally it is done.
I fire up the file manager, click on an opendocument, and try to spell check in Canadian French. Nope, no difference whatsoever... So I go back to the software centre, and hit "Remove" so it trundles for a while preparing to remove, and then crashes. I start-up the software centre again, and it offers to install it again. I do dpkg -l | grep libreoffice, and all the libreoffice packages are there, except for the language packs. wtf does ''Remove" from software Centre do if it doesn't even remove it? oth, it is likely consistent, since it worked before it was "installed" and it still worked after it was "Removed"
Starting to see a pattern? Stuff is pretty, it looks like it ought to work, it looks like it should be simple. There are ten different easy ways to do things. But if you actually see it through, all the simple obvious stuff doesn't work. broken, horribly mangled, user hostile. btw... a relevant a bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/875850