No more ugly blank window when last document is closed

[pluby]

I finally figured out how to implement OOo's "Quickstart" service. This service is what needed to be implemented in order to leave Neo/J running without any visible windows.

As many you already know, the ugly blank window was a hack to prevent Neo/J from shutting down when the last document is closed. By implementing the "Quickstart" service, closing the last document will cause the following to happen:

1. There will be no visible windows
2. Neo/J will stay running with an empty menubar

Since I couldn't put any of the Quickstart menus into the Neo/J menubar because it will conflict with Java's menu manager code, I have added the following Quickstart menu items in the "NeoOffice/J" menu:

- Text Document
- Spreadsheet
- Presentation
- Drawing
- Formula
- From Template
- Open Document

Note: these menu items are localized like the regular Neo/J menus.

Can you please test out this new code to make sure that this new code doesn't cause any crashing or hanging?

The new code is in the following test patch:

http://www.planamesa.com/test/NeoOfficeJ-1.1_Release_Candidate-TestPatch-4.1.dmg

Patrick

[Guest]

From my minimal testing it seems very stable (even under 10.4.1). This is great for usability. I always found he 'New Document' submenu in Ooo to be very unforgiving (on all platforms). Bravo!

[rays]

Inspired!

Thanks. I'm going to miss that familiar old blank grey window.....

[Guest]

This is possibly the most important and visible piece of non-Mac behaviour left. Great stuff! I'm on Jaguar - 10.2.8 - for a bit longer; is there anything in the new patch that'll prevent me from getting this to work? I'm happy to test if you reckon this should work on Jaguar.

Cheers, Phil

[sardisson]

[sardisson]

Seems to work well in quick initial testing here on 10.3.9 (both in English and Arabic).

I did notice that Cmd-W will still close the document but leave the grey window...if this Quickstart stuff turns out to be bug-free, you probably want to revert the behavior so that cmd-w closes the document and the grey window.

Two nit-picky AHIG-ish things:

All other Mac OS X apps put their additonal "AppName menu" options between "Preferences" and "Services", keeping "About" as the first item and Preferences as the second.

[NeoOffice/J]
==========
About Neo/J
-----------------
Preferences
-----------------
Text Document
...
------------------
Services >
------------------
Hide
...
------------------
Quit

Neo/J should do the same

Also, I think when you have so many items like Neo/J now does, a submenu is the best way of displaying them/keeping them organized. So instead of 7 menu items, one "Quickstart" submenu with 7 items seems less crowded/overwhelming...if it's possible within the OOo and Java frameworks.

Still, bravo!

Smokey

[fabrizio venerandi]

I'm using it without problems. Good work pluby!


f.

[rays]

After a couple of hours in use, I would second each of the remarks offered above by Smokey. In fact, I came to submit the same comments and found he'd beaten me to them!

I see that in Safari (for illustrative purposes), clicking on the dock icon when Safari is already launched but has no open windows, opens a new browser window (the only available document type).

On the other hand, NeoOfficeJ has four document types to choose from so a single default behaviour rule of opening a new text document may not suit all.

Being able to invoke a new text document from the default template via click on dock icon to activate NeoOfficeJ followed by cmnd-N would be a nice-to-have, as well, corresponding to behaviour when a blank grey window was previously present.

At one point in the past, I had the impression that the type of new document created using cmnd-N in NeoOfficeJ is dependent to some extent on whether I last used a spreadsheet or a text document, whereas invoking a new document via the new 'standalone' NeoOfficeJ menu (i.e. no windows open) would have to be associated with one particular type consistently, I guess? Would it break the rules to have cmnd-N for new text document and, say, shift-cmnd-N or opt-cmnd-N for new spreadsheet?

These are just thoughts and no deal-breakers. We users can adapt to the new behaviours just as easily as we learnt to adapt in the past.

[sardisson]

[rays]

Thanks for the advice. I can see where you are going with it. I'll await Patrick's 'final' implementation of this particular feature before diving in with localised set-up of keyboard short-cuts, but useful to remember they are available should I choose to pursue that option thereafter.

[pluby]

[pluby]

[sardisson]

[Guest]

OK, here's a list of what I've tried without the program complaining so far: (10.2.8, 867MHz Powerbook, 512Mb memory)

After installing the patch, I opened the program from the Dock, and got a blank text document after about 15 seconds. I closed the document window, and Neo stayed as the active menubar; I saw in the program menu that I could get a new blank document of any type. I then double-clicked a .doc in my Finder window and opened it, then closed that document and got the same result; Neo was the active app (and I still got the little black triangle thing in the Dock). I then opened a blank spreadsheet from the program menu and closed it with the same result. I then double-clicked a .sxc in my Finder window and opened it; then closed that window and got the same result.

The blank document windows opened in about half a second, while the .sxc spreadsheet window took about two seconds to open and the .doc window took about 8 seconds to import and display. These times are comparable to Openoffice 1.1.4 on my Windoze desktop machine at work. Thank you, Patrick.

Cheers, Phil


PS, just opened a 58 page .doc; it took 15 seconds to import and display. This is a basic problem with OOo 1.1 I think, and nothing to do with Neo, but it's surely something that the 2.0 developers need to overcome in their interoperability efforts.

[joshue]

THANK YOU. GREAT!javascript:emoticon('')

Joe