Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 5:35 pm Post subject: No more ugly blank window when last document is closed
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?
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!
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.
This is possibly the most important and visible piece of non-Mac behaviour left. Great stuff!
Agreed. And here I've been telling all the new poster the past few days that we were stuck with the hack
Anonymous wrote:
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
Phil, Patrick builds on 10.2.x (and has to in order to continue to build a binary that supports 10.2.x), so you should have no problems.
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
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 _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
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.
Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 3:41 am Post subject: Keyboard shortcuts for the Quickstart menu items
rays wrote:
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?
Cmd-N is associated with "New ____ Document" for the particular module that is active, which is why it doesn't work at all when the grey window is open (er, at least it didn't at one point in time--it now seems to open a text document, perhaps because that's what Patrick has hardwired the "inital startup" document to be. In OOo cmd/ctrl-n in the grey window does nothing).
You can remap the Cmd-N shortcut to one of the "Quickstart" documents using the Keyboard Shortcuts option in the System Preferences (as I describe in the next-to-last paragraph of the NeoWiki article on customizing keyboard shortcuts).
However, I'm not sure how it would interact with OOo's mode-switching behavior, esp. given the fact these items have the same name as items in other menus (i.e., the File: New submenu). It might fail altogether unless you go through an un-assign Cmd-N in all of the modules (using the built-in OOo shortcut editor); I think existing shortcuts take precedence over user-defined ones established in the System Prefs. You could, of course, assign any valid, unused shortcut.
Some experimentation is in order, but I don't have time atm to do so myself.
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
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.
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.
This is standard OOo behavior and will remain as it is not controlled by the Quickstart service code.
sardisson wrote:
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.
This I can implement. I put them first because I didn't know if there was some standard place to put them.
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.
This I can implement. I put them first because I didn't know if there was some standard place to put them.
Bad news. Java does some wonky things with the Preferences menu item so no matter what I do, I cannot force the Quickstart menu items below the Preferences menu item.
So, I have moved the Quickstart menu items between the About and Preferences menu items.
Bad news. Java does some wonky things with the Preferences menu item so no matter what I do, I cannot force the Quickstart menu items below the Preferences menu item.
So, I have moved the Quickstart menu items between the About and Preferences menu items.
I expected Java would throw a curve ball sooner or later That seems like a good solution, though; keeping "About Neo/J" at the top will be less disorienting.
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 7:29 pm Post subject: Testing patch 4.1
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.
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