Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
This is exactly what they need. Otherwise, Google Docs and Office 365 might end up making LibreOffice irrelevent.
Have you tried it recently? It's really very good.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I'd be surprised if it happens anytime soon. Libreoffice is still a fairly hefty download, and space on hand helds is still somewhat limited.
I havent had any problem with it. I use it at home exclusively, but I also use it at work when MS Office can't do the job. Just the other day I started writing a VB script for Excel (office version 10) got halfway through and remembered that the functionality I wanted was in Calc by default. But crashes? I just dont have them, could be I only use Linux versions.
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?
Yeah, it really needs a ribbon thing so that one can hide all the menu items behind huge icons and 'mouse over' moves. It is important to have huge icons, since people who use a word processor obviously cannot read and therefore cannot use menus...
Challenging interface.
Right. The Open/LibreOffice developers have gone to some trouble to make their suite pretty much idiot-proof. But I guess the trouble, as they say, with that is that idiots are becoming so ingenious... :-|
It is indeed pretty hefty (as is any office suite), but I imagine it would most likely be pared down for handheld use. I find it hard to even imagine anyone trying to use the more complex features in any meaningful way on a phone, or possibly even on a tablet device. But a decent document viewer is definitely much needed.
This is true. I begrudgingly use $PROGRAM. Challenging interface. Not a big fan of the random bugs. With the last two versions I used, $USING_FEATURE_X guarantees a crash. It's very unfortunate. I try to live with hope.
Look everyone, it's standard boilerplate to talk about any piece of FOSS you want!
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
This is true. I begrudgingly use Windows. Challenging interface. Not a big fan of the random bugs. With the last two versions I used, using any of my old hardware guarantees a crash. It's very unfortunate. I try to live with hope.
Which LibreOffice has had since day one. Even Base has an Access-like database.
I can't see why that wouldn't be in the port.
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.
'Functionally complete' as a goal is a good end in itself...but equally important is the fact that it must be a pleasure to use by first being a pleasure to look at.
I haven't looked at the latest version but my memory of earlier ones planted a bias in look and feel that will be hard to erase. On Windows XP, the 'beast' took forever to load and once it did, you wouldn't admire its interface.
An Access-like module actually exists but is very clunky to the extent of being unsealable. These folks should borrow a leaf from Microsoft, where the entire office suite, even with its bugs works 'flawlessly' 99% of the time for 99% of users.
Have you even used it?
LibreOffice has had pivot tables since day one, they call the feature DataPilot. And you can do a polynomial regression with the LINEST function. And the import/export gets better with every release.
Out of curiosity I just tried on the last two versions but sorry to spoil your rant, no crashes.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I haven't seen any bugs in the Windows version, on the other hand it loads a bit slow, and the scripting API is just horribly convoluted, and underdocumented.
Yes, i second the call for a skinnable interface...
Some people prefer the current interface, some prefer the ms2k7 style ribbon etc. You can't suit everyone with the defaults, so make the interface flexible, let users choose the skin and provide a handful of sensible defaults to choose from.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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.
I've had OpenOffice crash on me with two (I think) different documents, both written in Word for Mac. Both documents also crashed Word 2003 for Windows. Perfect compatibility with a rubbish document format aside, it's been very stable.
If they pare it down for mobiles, I'd love to see it built back up from that for a desktop version. Same base build with extra modules. Done right, it should address a lot of the speed / size concerns.
You can change the icons quite easily and there are a number of sets available online. To change the icon set go to Tools>Options>View and you will see an option for Icon Size and Style. Select a style from the drop down menu. BTW I find the LibreOffice interface infinitely preferable to the mess that MS Office now uses. I used to be a fan of MS Office and thought it was their best product but switched OpenOffice long ago after having suffered more and more bugs and the interface becoming more convoluted and less productive. Having switched again to LibreOffice I have found the improvements over OOo very well executed and had no bug problems. The project seems to be moving along nicely and MS Office file support is excellent.
"You can lead a horse to water but a pencil must be lead!" - Stan Laurel
not really my tablet has 8gb of flash with around 6.3 GB free to use as you wish + another 8gb mini sd
my netbook has an 8gb sdd and i run libre office on that everyday. The bigger question would be how much ram is needed/ available to run libre office.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
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.
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 have and its stil sloooooooooow as hell. While I give it out on new builds simply because its "free as in beer" after trying to use it for a month it pissed me off enough I went ahead and loaded the MS Office 2K7 I had sitting in a drawer, although honestly I have yet to see any version beat my beloved Office 2K. That to me was the best version ever,light and nimble. I have that one loaded onto my netbook as its light weight saves battery life.
I'm sorry but while LO has many things going for it lightweight and nimble ain't among them. I don't blame the LO guys though, they've only had a year and we are talking some seriously NASTY code. Has anyone here looked at the OO.o code? I have, wow talk about a big bloated mess! The LO guys probably need to chunk a good portion of it and go modular to fix the bloat, and that will take time. I say give them another year to two years and see where they are then. By that time we should know whether they are gonna be able to pull it off.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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?
--
make install -not war
Maybe you should look at fixing your computer.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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."
Writer opens in less than a second on my very ordinary Dell laptop.
Maybe you should look at fixing your computer.
I second that. It opens up faster than Office '08 on my several year old MacBook in OS X and similarly fast in Ubuntu. There are no performance issues while it runs. Of all the OpenOffice variants I have installed - OOo, Symphony, KOffice, LibreOffice, and NeoOffice - Libre runs the best.
Like the parent I would prefer them to focus on the desktop version but that's mainly because I have no interest in a mobile version. Having said that, I can understand why having a mobile version may be important for the community. The big hurdle with LibreOffice is getting businesses to accept it. Having a mobile version is a bullet point that some suits may care about despite the fact they may never use it. So it's probably a worthwhile endeavor.
As far as a word processor, LibreOffice is there. It's good enough. Once the spreadsheet and presentation parts can match the quality of the word processor (i.e. good enough to replace MS Office), MS Office will be on the way out.
Oops, I kind of went off topic there: If your computer can't run LibreOffice smoothly, it's your computer. It's either time to get rid of the malware or upgrade.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Bull... shit...
When contractors are shopping for tools, they don't buy the one that's pretty, they buy the one that fucking works the best. Asthetics be dammed.
Give me black and white icons, I don't care. Mac OS was beloved with its primitive scheme for years. Put me in front of a Windows 7 system, and Office 2007 with it's god-dammed awful ribbon that makes it hard to do the basics, and impossible to do anything remotely advanced, and I'll throw the fucking thing out the window, no matter how pretty it might be.
Worst of all, I think there are a number of people that bought the same feaux Jobsian bullship mantra as you, which is why Gnome and Kde are slashing and burning their base, and XFce grows in popularity despite absolutely never improving in any way... (in fact XFce3 was better all-around).
Hell, I'd switch back to text-mode if the text-only apps were developing a bit better (links is dead and rotting).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
--
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