Plans for OOo 1.1 on OS X?

JKT · Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2003 4:34 am Post subject: Plans for OOo 1.1 on OS X?

Just a couple of quick questions:

With the release for the other platforms yesterday, are there any plans to produce an OOo v1.1 for OS X (X11)?

Also, is there any way to change the button icons, or at least the horrible grey background in OOo in OS X? I see from the /. thread on OOo 1.1 that there are ways and means to do this in Linux...

Guest · Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2003 4:45 am Post subject:

JKT,

Riccardo Loselli has been putting out builds of 1.1 for OS X, but part of the issue is that Apple's X11 doesn't play well with 1.1. You have to really install it and see, since the effect is hard to describe. Its like everything normally displayed in the OOo Window is stuck at absolute screen coordinates 10,10, but the window itself can be dragged around. Hitting the resize widget only makes it worse.

Its going to be a slow process to get 1.1 up to the functional level of 1.0.3, and Eds and my efforts are divided between that and working on NeoOffice at the same time. As always, its a question of time. I had said around 2 weeks at the minimum to get something "useable" out, but now I'm not quite sure when that will be. I need to sit down and debug why our printing and export->PDF isn't working very well at all right now for 1.1, even though the code is the same as 1.0.3.

WRT the icons, I think you're stuck. The Ximian icon set is great, but dependent on a lot of patches to the code that are somewhat obtuse. The background is easier, but will never be an Aqua one until NeoOffice. It could be lightened however. We'll have to look into it. The other platforms (gnome in particular) use a small helper application that gets color & style hints from GNOME and passes it back to OOo. Both Red Hat and Ximian used to hardcode the background color before this applet, and neither solution is a very good one...

Dan

JKT · Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2003 5:20 am Post subject:

Thanks for the response Dan. My vote is for a 10% grey background (or aqua style stripy one if possible). The darkness of the current grey is totally out of place on the Mac, IMO.

Guest · Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2003 7:29 am Post subject:

JKT · Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2003 8:57 am Post subject:

I'm actually thinking more in terms of how NeoOffice/J looks at present - if a better background (be it a lighter grey or stripes if possible) and/or icons can be applied, it would ease the shock of running it a bit (for newbies). Just thinking ahead for more "final" builds...

Any chance of a screenshot of Brand X? The "need to know how to use X11 OOo installers" has put me off attempting a download Embarassed

Edit: In fact the light grey background of this post is more in line with what I'm thinking - perhaps another 10 to 20% lighter still.

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

here is a screen shot of brand X

http://www.neooffice.org/images/ooobrandx-writer.jpg

-j

JKT · Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2003 1:27 am Post subject:

Thanks jakeOSX - the icons certainly look better (are they from AbiWord?) but still the same grey background.

nedrichards · Agent Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 18

are the icons from AbiWord: shock!

No, brandx is the grafting of the Ximian 'GNOME-isation' of OOo onto OS X so they fulfil a good portion of the GNOME HIG which is similar enough to the OS X HIG that these are quite useful as icons until we go out and hire/have volunteer professional icon designers like Ximian do.

It looks like AbiWord becuase AbiWord is a GNOME app.

Guest · Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2003 10:11 am Post subject:

Interestingly enough, MIchael Meeks has a patch that applies window background bitmaps to X11 windows. That got me thinking that yes, we _could_ put the Aqua background onto X11 windows, but of course there are 2 problems:

1) the background would be misaligned in many places (not as much of a problem with 10.3 and its muted stripes though)
2) the buttons would still look like ass, their normal grey and rectangluar style, on top of the Aqua background

Dan

fa · The Architect Joined: May 27, 2003 Posts: 88

I also tried to track down the Apple X11 canvas offset issue last night and didn't really get any insight as to why its all screwed up. This might be harder to track down than I thought.

Dan

OPENSTEP · Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2003 8:26 pm Post subject:

Yes, I intend to get a 1.1 out at some point in time. I too tried to track down the Apple X11 bizarre positioning bug a while back and had near no luck nailing it. I got to the point of trying to look at diffs in vcl to figure out what changed, but got distracted doing other things. That's the really major bug that's prevented a "developer release" kind of thing since there are many people using Apple X11 and less and less using XFree86 or a non-quartz-wm window manager with Apple X11.

Aside from the printing issues Dan mentioned, the other thing that will shoot us in the foot is the CJK support. We need to go back and fix up font encodings to recognize the Mac TrueType Asian fonts. This is no easy task and one we explicitly punted on in 1.0.3.

And there's the known issues bugs and new ones that have been filed against 1.0.3 that will take time to track down.

Then there's also the process of putting together a non-X11 installer, doing extensive testing of the program again (yup, the compiler changed again), getting new Mozilla builds for the gcc3.3 ABI, verifying that the other patches still work with any changes in 1.1 (e.g. multiuser patch, localization, foreign language dictionary installation), and more I probably am missing right now.

Oh yeah, not to mention the OS X features people want to see even in the X11 version like the file dialogs, address book drivers, quick start/continual backgrounding apps for when (liek good mac users) they close the last window...

1.1 on OS X compiles, but is still very much experimental at this time, is missing a lot of the OS X specific enhancements from 1.0.3 (printing, for one), and it's going to take a bit of development and testing before it's probably going to be good enough to be called "final". It's a lot of work...and we really don't have enough programmers to spread around on all of the different projects that need to get done in 1.1 (and do Neo, and speak at conferences, and have day jobs, and drink beer and watch football...hey, even crazy insane programmers need time off too...).

ed

OPENSTEP · Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2003 9:13 pm Post subject: More clarification on Brand X

Brand X is more then just the icons...it's actually got better font kerning support in it, is fully LGPL, and has the majority of the Ximian patches. Think of it like Ximian Desktop Edition OOo, but compiled for Mac OS X. It includes Ximian's bug fixes and improvements that weren't ever incorporated by OOo, not just its pretty icons Smile

For more, check out the releases FAQ and the Ximian web links.

ed

Michael · Guest

Dang. Reading through the posts above, you guys are doing an amazing job, and it's obvious there are many more subtle problems to solve in getting a release out than most people probably realize. It's obviously not just a matter of re-compiling the new 1.1 codebase under the OS X environment. I/we probably don't say it enough, so thanks for all your hard work.

fa · The Architect Joined: May 27, 2003 Posts: 88

God no... Its a lot harder than just recompiling. We made the decision to compile 1.1 with Apple's GCC 3.3 which made it slightly harder, but allows us more forward mobility. GCC 3.3 support was over a year coming, since we tried with 3.1 last year but failed due to bugs Apple fixed earlier this spring. And that's just the low-level stuff that ahs nothing to do with the printing enhancements, font enhancements, etc.

Installers are another story since a lot of people won't touch OOo on Mac OS X unless we provide a nice, graphical installer. Its a bunch of work, but made a lot easier by the 2 years we put into 1.0.x Smile

Dan