What's blocking me from diving in ...

[limakilo]

Hi All

Many thanks for all the great work done on NeoOffice. It has been a key influencer in moving my business from PC desktops to the Mac.

IMHO NeoOffice works great (if a little slow) and the only real pain at the moment is that the file dialog is not native.

I am an experienced software engineer and my current main project is developing a Cocoa app. I'd love to contribute to NeoOffice (in particular native file dialogs). However, there a few blockers in my way. I post these in the hope that I can be persuaded to dive in.

1) I hear the build time is 36 hours. That's going to make it very difficult for me to start until I buy some new hardware and can dedicate a box to NeoOffice dev.

2) Will NeoOffice support the OpenDocument formats? These are the default in OOo V2

3) Apple's lack of support for the Open* formats. Can we grease the wheels by developing plugins or filters? BTW given iWorks has no spreadsheet would it be a good idea to develop "NeoSheet" - a light weight spreadsheet branched from NeoOffice?

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards

Neil Williams

[OPENSTEP]

Build time depends on machine type. While the initial build may take a day or two, after all of the libraries are built doing real development means you only need to rebuild a shared library or two, not the whole shebang. That's a much quicker process.

As to OpenDocument formats, we'll be compatible with them when we move the code base to one of the OOo versions that supports them. OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 which in theory (if it isn't vaporware) will backport OpenDocument formats into the 1.1.x codebase. None of the earlier OOo versions (including derivatives) will be compatible. Sadly, neither will may third party utilities for parsing and outputting OOo formatted files.

As to (3), that's not in my purview. There are no filter plugin APIs available for the Apple applications that I know of...not to mention that I don't own a copy. What can be done is the reverse: give OpenOffice.org the ability to read and write Keynote and Pages documents. See the "Keynote File Filter" doc here for more details:

http://www.dashboardbuddha.com/OOo/specs/index.html

Since that document was written near two years ago there have been some XML based additions to OOo itself, so it may be possible to write XSLT filters without diving into the C++ file parsing code. You may want to do some more research.

Unfortunately, neither the Keynote 2 nor Pages schemas are publicly documented at this time. If you want to do this, you can probably ask ADC and they'll give you access. While for me there are more important tasks than the Keynote filters, I'd love if someone else would jump in and grab the bull by the horns.

ed