A peek at NeoOffice Mobile

OPENSTEP · Posted: Wed Apr 22, 2009 9:14 pm Post subject: A peek at NeoOffice Mobile

Some people may remember at our NeoOffice event in Milan last June, Patrick and I talked about an idea called NeoOffice Mobile. The thought behind NeoOffice Mobile was to provide a way for NeoOffice users to securely publish documents from within NeoOffice and allow only the users that they trust the ability to view the document from any web browser or mobile phone. We got a lot of feedback from discussions at the Milan event and from these discussions we started to form a coherent product design. Unfortunately, we were not able to start implementation of our product design because Patrick has been inundated with all of the ongoing NeoOffice development and support work and neither of us are experts in building large web applications.

Towards the end of last year I was discussing our idea with one of my friends. Tim is a software engineer who has lots of expertise in designing and implementing large web applications. Tim gave me some great advice and seemed interested in the NeoOffice Mobile idea and its potential. Since then, Tim - who goes by "TimT" on this site - has been helping me implement a working NeoOffice Mobile prototype. I want to thank him for all of the effort he has done to help me turn NeoOffice Mobile from an idea into a working application.

As Tim and I were working on NeoOffice Mobile, we focused on three things that we hope NeoOffice users will find useful:

Mobile phone support (see snapshot in first attached image) - Since the primary function of NeoOffice Mobile is to allow you to share documents with other people, we store your document in HTML format so that any web browser can display your document even if your web browser is on a mobile phone with a 200 x 200 pixel screen. Since some mobile phones like Apple's iPhone support PDF, we also store your document in PDF format so that users can view an identical copy of your document if they want to.
Tight integration with NeoOffice (see snapshot in second attached image) - We wanted to make the task of publishing a document in NeoOffice Mobile as simple as possible. We made NeoOffice Mobile accessible from a floating window within NeoOffice. Once you are logged into your NeoOffice Mobile account, you can publish the current active document directly from the Save button in the NeoOffice Mobile floating window and the NeoOffice Mobile code will upload copies of your document to the NeoOffice Mobile servers in HTML, PDF, and ODF formats.
Security and high availability - Data security has always been important to us so we made all network communications use full SSL encryption (SSL encryption is the mechanism used for HTTPS web pages). Also, by default, any documents that users publish in NeoOffice Mobile are not viewable by any other users unless the user explicitly shares the document. Lastly, all NeoOffice Mobile data is duplicated on multiple machines in different data centers to ensure that if one of our servers goes down, users can still access NeoOffice Mobile.

Although NeoOffice Mobile is still in the prototype stage, we think by mid-May things will be stable enough for users to check it out. We hope to make a NeoOffice Mobile test site available for users to have a sneak preview of what Tim and I have been working on and start giving us feedback.

ed

OPENSTEP · Posted: Wed Apr 22, 2009 9:25 pm Post subject: Some more iPhone screenshots

Having problems attaching all to the same post Smile

ed

jakeOSX · Ninja Joined: Aug 12, 2003 Posts: 1373

looks great man! this will be a good feature for neo.

if you need blackberry tester =D i happen to have a storm.

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

OPENSTEP · Posted: Thu Apr 23, 2009 10:19 am Post subject:

Yeah we still need to tweak the mobile layouts...that's been on the low end of the bug fixing list right now.

Does the Storm have PDF rendering in the browser? Right now we're checking user-agent and delivering PDF for viewing for the iPhone only; all other mobile browsers get an HTML rendering. I thought PDF was an iPhone only thing, but I haven't been keeping track of the state of all of the mobile OSes lately Smile

ed

jakeOSX · Ninja Joined: Aug 12, 2003 Posts: 1373

just did a quick check of PPT turned into a PDF file.

the storm opened it in the browser (i figured it would use doc's to go, but it didn't appear to) but didn't do a good job of rendering it.

Samwise · Posted: Thu Apr 23, 2009 1:17 pm Post subject:

That looks great! Not sure I'd have much use for it though, but I'm sure others will find it useful Smile

narf · The Anomaly Joined: Jan 21, 2007 Posts: 1075

OPENSTEP · Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 10:37 am Post subject: