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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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 Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 1:00 pm Post subject: NeoOffice 3.0 EAP revised dates |
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FYI. Since I noticed that OOoCon this year will be in mid-October and given the newness of many of the new features in OOo 3.0 Beta like OpenXML import support and a new bibliography tool, I suspect that the official OOo 3.0 release will likely be shortly before OOoCon.
Based on this assumption, our past experience is that only the next 5 months, there will be a lot of code changes in the OOo codebase so running a 5 or 6 month EAP program may be a waste of our EAP members' limited testing time.
So, I have updated the following Early Access Program URL to have estimated dates that are more in line with what we have done in past releases: wait until OOo does an official before we do our EAP release:
http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/earlyaccess.php
Patrick |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 1:12 pm Post subject: |
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Any thoughts or comments?
Note that neither Ed nor I will be idle during this time. Instead, we will be continuing support NeoOffice and adding new features that benefit Mac users. One feature we are exploring (our working title is NeoOffice Mobile) is add a server that allows secure viewing of your NeoOffice documents from the iPhone and other phones.
Patrick |
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ovvldc
Captain Naiobi
Joined: Sep 13, 2004
Posts: 2352
Location: Zürich, CH
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| Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 1:59 pm Post subject: |
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Will that be running on the iPhone or headless on your Mac at home?
Anyway, I read at the ScummVM forum that the iPhone App store licensing requirements exclude viral license agreements such as GPL. I hope that this will not affect you.
Best wishes,
Oscar
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"What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi |
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rpatrick
Councilperson
Joined: Aug 29, 2007
Posts: 108
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| Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 2:35 pm Post subject: |
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It makes perfect sense to me - and this is one of the things that has always impressed me about you guys: you go for stability above all else so while some people might want new features of new OOo versions quicker, you guys are always sensible about it and only release new versions when you know they are of the highest quality. I for one have never had a crash with Neo (I cannot say that about ANY other software!) and I use it all the time and have done since Aqua Beta 3 (wow was that a long time ago?).
For me (and I'm sure most people when it comes to office suites!) stability is a lot more important than anything else and at the rate you improve/add new features I think everyone will be quite happy to wait however long you think is necessary for a quality NeoOffice 3!
Thank you for keeping us informed. I'm looking forward to seeing Neo continue to improve over the coming months.
Richard |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 2:37 pm Post subject: |
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| ovvldc wrote: | Will that be running on the iPhone or headless on your Mac at home?
Anyway, I read at the ScummVM forum that the iPhone App store licensing requirements exclude viral license agreements such as GPL. I hope that this will not affect you. |
Since we want users to be able to publish their documents in a format that as many phones (or even desktop web browsers) as possible support and given that Ed and I are the only available programmers, we will start with a much simpler solution: publishing PDF and HTML versions of your document so that phones' built-in web browser can download and view the document.
For us, security and reliability are extremely important so we are thinking that, when you decide to publish a document for viewing by your trusted group of people, we can use NeoOffice to do the hard work of getting PDF and HTML renderings of your document and these two and your original document to a secure HTTPS server. Then, depending on which phone or desktop web browser each of your trusted people login into the NeoOffice Mobile website with, the default link for you file will be a link to either the PDF or HTML file. For the iPhone, you get PDF as we know it has Safari and can render PDF nicely. For generic phone X, we link to HTML.
BTW, this is one of the reasons that I have been adding HTTPS support to all of our servers: to ensure that we have the HTTPS infrastructure in place before we do any development.
Patrick |
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djpimley
The Anomaly
(earlier version)
Joined: Jun 11, 2006
Posts: 481
Location: Great Britain
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| Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 1:45 am Post subject: |
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| pluby wrote: | Any thoughts or comments?
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It's useful from my point of view, because I wanted to hook up with Armando again and get the Akua icon set completed, and also create some 512px document icons, before the EAP begins. |
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MacRat
Sake Horner
Joined: Mar 02, 2006
Posts: 364
Location: Earth
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| Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 11:09 am Post subject: |
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| pluby wrote: | | given that Ed and I are the only available programmers, we will start with a much simpler solution: publishing PDF and HTML versions of your document so that phones' built-in web browser can download and view the document. |
A similar service like this has existed for a couple of years. Not via a download, but e-mail.
Just e-mail ODF and M$Office documents to pdfme@sun.com and it will reply with a PDF version of the document. |
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sardisson
Town Crier
Joined: Feb 01, 2004
Posts: 4588
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| Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 11:17 am Post subject: |
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| djpimley wrote: | | pluby wrote: | Any thoughts or comments?
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It's useful from my point of view, because I wanted to hook up with Armando again and get the Akua icon set completed, and also create some 512px document icons, before the EAP begins. |
Someone slap me a month or so ahead of the icon deadline so I can go through and finish the icon->filename mapping I started so that Daniel, Armando, and co. can submit one complete Akua set with all the icons instead of the current situation where we combine two of them....
Smokey
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"[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 12:13 pm Post subject: |
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| MacRat wrote: | A similar service like this has existed for a couple of years. Not via a download, but e-mail.
Just e-mail ODF and M$Office documents to pdfme@sun.com and it will reply with a PDF version of the document. |
That's not really want we are envisioning. That service is merely a converter which NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org can already do on the desktop.
What we are thinking of is actual secure storage and selective sharing of your documents with our people. In essence, we are talking about something similar to posting on your .Mac website except, by default, we have the following features:
1. Publishing to the site is integrated directly into NeoOffice (and maybe eventually OpenOffice.org via an OOo extension)
2. The publishing and viewing of your document is done with HTTPS to ensure that files can be uploaded and viewed securely over wireless or any other network
3. While your .Mac homepage is open to anyone by default, our plan is to have the default be that only your account will be able to view your documents. You will be able to grant (and later revoke) other user accounts view access to your documents
4. Unlike .Mac and iDisk, we will use NeoOffice's or OpenOffice.org's built-in HTML and PDF export features to create and upload the HTML and PDF files that most phones need to view a document.
In general, NeoOffice Mobile is trying to support secure sharing of documents with a small group of people. There are many high-end solutions for doing such secure document sharing, but they are usually designed as an enterprise solution that costs several thousand dollars at a minimim.
We think that we can leverage our existing server infrastructure and existing NeoOffice patching process to provide some of the core features of such solutions at very low cost. The hope is that if we can keep the cost low enough, we can provide this service purely as a "thank you" feature for our larger donors like the Early Access Program currently does.
Patrick |
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MacRat
Sake Horner
Joined: Mar 02, 2006
Posts: 364
Location: Earth
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| Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 3:00 pm Post subject: |
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| pluby wrote: | | What we are thinking of is actual secure storage and selective sharing of your documents with our people. |
Ah, Google Docs! |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 3:32 pm Post subject: |
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| MacRat wrote: | | pluby wrote: | | What we are thinking of is actual secure storage and selective sharing of your documents with our people. |
Ah, Google Docs! |
In some respects, yes. But we won't be trying to do any document editing in a web browser. 
Patrick |
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doctype
Oracle
Joined: Dec 08, 2005
Posts: 291
Location: Berlin, Germany
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| Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 4:55 am Post subject: |
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| pluby wrote: | | 1. Publishing to the site is integrated directly into NeoOffice |
NeoOffice in the cloud! Great, great idea!  |
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OPENSTEP
The One
Joined: May 25, 2003
Posts: 4752
Location: Santa Barbara, CA
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| Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 12:17 pm Post subject: |
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In some ways I see it as replicating a very very limited subset of functionality of SharePoint. We're not tackling collaborative editing, but rather sharing and mobile rendering. Some other similar products in this market segment are O3Spaces and DocumentsToGo, but we're focusing much more on sharing and secure offsite storage (kind of like an offsite backup). Doing the PDF rendering is one of the quickest ways we were able to think of to try and bridge platforms...for example it is a way to deliver Impress presentations from an iPhone, alebit without animations, movies, or sound. For editing you'd still need OOo or Neo on a laptop/desktop, but secured delivery in cross-platform renderable formats is the primary goal.
I have no idea if that clarified anything Patrick said or not; we're obviously trying to hash out the idea and whether it's something that people would find useful.
ed |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 1:13 pm Post subject: |
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I think Ed's explanation is better than mine has been so far. To add on to Ed's points, what we are trying to do is to start extending NeoOffice so that it help simplify common task for many users that use NeoOffice very frequently in their daily workflow.
The problem we keep running into is that while many users would like to see NeoOffice replicate many MS Office workflow features like Word VBA support, End Note support, AppleScript support, non-linear Solver support, etc., our funding makes replicating such MS Office features infeasible. At the same time, we don't want to just limit NeoOffice features to whatever Sun Microsystems' OOo engineers deem to be adequate.
So, we have been focussing on adding features that we hope that NeoOffice users find convenient and useful that don't require massive rewriting of the OpenOffice.org code.
The Media Browser, native tool windows, horizontal mousewheel support, and grammar checker support are some of the small things that we have added recently. We hope that our users find value in NeoOffice Mobile.
Patrick |
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rpatrick
Councilperson
Joined: Aug 29, 2007
Posts: 108
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| Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 2:02 pm Post subject: |
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This sounds very cool indeed! One question: I thought that server/bandwidth for this kind of thing was expensive? Mind I suppose most docs are much smaller than 1MB whereas a NeoOffice download is well over 100 so perhaps for something like this the costs would be very low?
Richard |
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