04.22.08
Posted in Links, Open Source, Software at 2:37 am by Smokey
Marc “uwog” Maurer, a leading AbiWord developer, on AbiWord’s 2008 Google Summer of Code projects:
Interestingly, we did receive quite a few applications about improving OOXML support, while we got zero OpenDocument related proposals. Apparently the support for the OpenDocument ISO standard isn’t strong enough in the F/OSS community to actually make an effort to improve support for it. Even when paid. Food for thought.
Both sad and disturbing for advocates of truly free and open standards for document formats (of which I am one).
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03.23.08
Posted in Open Source, Software at 8:54 pm by Smokey
Last Monday NeoOffice.org (aka Patrick and Ed, with bits of help from the rest of us) released the latest NeoOffice milestone, 2.2.3. Although this version is still using the OpenOffice.org 2.2 codebase, 2.2.3 is packed full of new Mac goodies you won’t find in other open source office suites for the Mac.
We’ve long been “spoiled” on the Mac by having things “just work”—often through the hard work of Apple engineers designing APIs and “for free” features of standard objects, but also through the hard work of application developers themselves. When porting an application from another platform, many of these things that “just work” in born-on-the-Mac apps don’t work. Because of our high standards as Mac users, it’s hard to build a good Mac app, and even harder to build a good Mac version of a cross-platform app.
NeoOffice began its life as an application that was hard to call even Mac-like (in comparison to OpenOffice.org, which only ran under X11, it was a gem; in comparison to Microsoft Office X, not so much), and development tackled the important tasks of stability and functionality (printing! native fonts!) first, gradually adding more characteristics of a standard Mac application and culminating in the “fully Aqua” NeoOffice 2.1 release last April. Of course there’s always more to do—another non-Mac-like bit to polish, another new Apple feature to include—and over the last year more standard Mac features were added (though at a slower pace, as feature size increased).
With NeoOffice 2.2.3, Ed added support for Mac OS X 10.5’s grammar checker to the existing support for the Mac OS X spell-checker (the support is fully pluggable, if anyone knows of any other grammar-checking backends). Patrick finally got the pop-up file hierarchy working in document titlebars (one of those “you don’t miss it until you go to use it and it’s not there” features). The lack of application menus when no documents were open became a thing of the past; your File menu and recent documents are always a click away now. The team ripped out OpenOffice.org’s arcane and crippled scanner support and replaced it with native Image Capture support for importing images from scanners and cameras. Our dedicated team of icon artists replaced a few dozen more ugly platform-generic icons with new Akua versions, bringing NeoOffice that much closer to the 7K+ figure required for a complete icon set.
By far the largest feature in 2.2.3, however, is support for embedded video playback. QuickTime is one of those ubiquitous Mac technologies that everyone expects to “just work” in every program; it’s in your web browser, your jukebox, and your presentations (don’t ask me why; maybe you want to spin around a model of a molecule or fly through a room in your building design?). Now it’s in your open source office suite, too, playing any non-protected QuickTime-supported format on Mac OS X 10.4 and above (and spinning your molecule models until your battery runs out), just like all of those other Mac apps you love.
What’s to come in the future? The OpenOffice.org 3.0 codebase, that much is for sure. Beyond that, we’ll have to see what other tricks Patrick and Ed have up their sleeves (Ed likes to tease everyone with screenshots of his machinations), but the OOo 3.0 upgrade will be huge in itself, thanks to the work of Sun’s OpenOffice.org and Novell’s ooo-build engineers.
One final note: if you’re a NeoOffice user who will be near Milan in late May, FreeSMUG.org will be hosting a NeoOffice event with Patrick and Ed. See the NeoWiki for more information.
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10.21.07
Posted in Life, Open Source at 12:43 am by Smokey
Not too long ago, someone emailed me looking for a Mac OS X version of the excellent libwpd tools for converting WordPerfect documents. Said correspondant had found my email and a now-404ed URL from a message in a mailing list archive, but couldn’t find a live version of the tools. After that, I told myself I needed to do a better job of blogging about libwpd and our releases, so that there would be fresher hits and valid URLs in search engines.
To that end, we released libwpd-0.8.12 earlier this month (it’s been a busy one for me, hence the delay). The main addition in this version is Fridrich’s fine work in bringing support for tabs and text alignment in WordPerfect 5 and WordPerfect for Mac 2.x and 3.x documents. Tabs and text alignment are probably the last common, “daily-use” features that were not converted in these document formats, and they are now supported more-or-less on par with WordPerfect 6/7/8/9/10/11/12 documents. This release is great news for Mac users who formerly used WordPerfect, as document fidelity should be much improved. In addition, for the first time ever, the Mac OS X versions of the tools are Universal Binaries.
Meanwhile, Fridrich is pushing forward on support for converting text and image boxes for the 0.9 series. Great things are in store for the future.
In the meantime, you can download the libwpd command-line tools (and an AppleScript wrapper for wpd2sxw) for Mac OS X from the project site and go convert documents with tabs until you’re blue in the face. Enjoy!
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07.29.07
Posted in Camino, Open Source at 12:20 pm by Smokey
In the beginning, there was email. It was open, it was interoperable, and all was well.
Then came the web, and, for a while, it, too was open and interoperable, and all was well.
Then came “online services,” walled gardens that kept their users from the web and interoperable email. They were closed, proprietary ecosystems; interoperability was a late, shoehorned addition. All was not well for users locked inside these gardens.
Then came the days of the lawless, “Wild West Web,” where interoperability was bleeding on the main street outside the saloon after the duel with browser vendors determined to make the web something that only worked in their browser. Users, citizens of this internet junction, were suffering.
Then a new sheriff rode into town, on a fire-breathing red lizard. It was Mozilla, determined to make the internet, all of it (as witnessed by its flagship product, an all-in-one suite of internet applications), open and interoperable again. Lawlessness was at an all-time high, but slowly the sheriff gathered a set of deputies, chief among them Chimera and Phoenix, and later Thunderbird, to help reign in lawlessness and make the internet open and interoperable again and to promote the public benefit. Citizens rejoiced.
Now we are seeing a rise of new walled gardens, the last refuges of those who would partition the internet into tiny fiefdoms where they might lord over their users like serfs. These walled gardens are not open or interoperable; one cannot be in one walled garden and talk to someone in another. They merely leverage the hard-won openness of the web to erect their redoubts and then lock their massive gates. Citizens are beginning to feel the burden of rushing from one walled garden to another in order to communicate with each other.
Who will lead the fight against these new walled gardens, to ensure we do not face another dark era of lawlessness on the internet where communication becomes an impossible or arduous task? The outcome of the Great Thunderbird War will tell.
We must hope the noble and just will win, or we face a dark, uncertain future of walled gardens looming over the open web, and open communication will be only a faint, fond memory.
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06.30.07
Posted in History, Open Source, Software at 2:07 am by Smokey
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy, er, back in the late 80s and early 90s, WordPerfect was the dominant word processor, ubiquitous (try finding commercial software today available on that many platforms) and powerful. The Mac version was Mac-like, a good citizen, easy to use and uncluttered yet still powerful (in fact, in 2007, the last released version, 3.5, dating to 1995—with a small but not insignificant update to 3.5e in 1997—does everything I’ve ever wanted to do with a word processor, save Unicode, and I’ve wanted to do some above-average things).
If you’ve been using computers since the late 80s or early 90s, or perhaps went to school in the mid/late 90s at an institution with a Novell network, chances are you have a collection of old WordPerfect documents. Fortunately (if you have any need of the data in those documents), some fine folks have created a very good file format translator (libwpd) for WordPerfect documents, which is available stand-alone and is also incorporated into open-source programs such as AbiWord, KWord, NeoOffice, and OpenOffice.org, and commercial products such as Nisus Writer Express. Currently libwpd supports most features of most common WordPerfect file formats, but the big missing piece was images. After all, everyone has some sort of images in their documents: logos in company letterhead, figures in reports or papers, clip art in family newsletters.
Last summer, the file format translator (libwpg) for the WordPerfect image format really took off, thanks to Ariya, but there was still no way to get a WordPerfect document with an image to open in any of those other applications and include the image. So close, but so far away….
This week Fridrich has been working on finally bringing libwpd and libwpg together, so that WordPerfect documents with images can be opened by other applications and retain their images—and the result looks good! Things are still rough, and and some images still won’t be converted properly, but you can see it with your own eyes; a new hope for old WordPerfect documents with images.
Thanks, Fridrich, Ariya, and all the other libwpd and libwpg hackers; this is indeed an exciting day!
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04.25.07
Posted in Open Source at 12:13 am by Smokey
If you’ve ever been tired of hearing “Unfortunately, the current scope of the NeoOffice project is limited by resources to keeping a native version of OpenOffice.org running on Mac OS X” (goodness knows I’ve been tired of saying it, and I imagine Patrick, Ed, and the other members of the NeoOffice community have as well), today is an exciting day.
Patrick has just announced the NeoOffice New Features Program, wherein users can donate funds towards implementing a specific new feature. If you want a feature implemented, donate, and if enough of your fellow users also want this feature and donate, Patrick and Ed will implement the feature.
Right now there are two features available for donations—they’re feature requests that have been fairly common and would improve the level of Mac OS X integration in NeoOffice—use of the native spellchecker (where available) and integration of the Mac OS X Address Book as a native data source (right now if you want to use data from Address Book, this less-than-ideal process is required). Patrick and Ed have analyzed and scoped these features and have determined an approximate cost of implementing each feature; if the amount of money required is raised before the deadline (all funds collected for features that don’t meet the required amount will be refunded; PayPal sets a deadline on refunds), the feature will be implemented.
If the costs of the features seem prohibitive, please remember that 1) Patrick and Ed live in California, a place that has a ridiculously high cost of living, and 2) Ed has a full-time job, and Patrick must balance NeoOffice work with consulting work to keep his family fed and housed. Developing software, especially software as popular as NeoOffice, is not cheap. Historically, a number of major feature additions, like drag-and-drop support, have been funded by significant donations; for the first time, the average user has a chance to fund a feature even if he or she doesn’t have deep pockets.
What if your favorite feature isn’t on the list? Don’t despair; other features will be added for funding in the future, once Patrick and Ed have had time to scope them out and estimate the cost. A popular request since Patrick first announced his intent to begin this program is support for video (e.g., whatever QuickTime can decode), especially in Impress, and some interest has been expressed in supporting PDF as an embeddable image format (e.g., not editable, but similar to how EPS files are currently handled). If you have another idea you’d like to propose for future consideration, please start a new thread in the New Features Program forum (if no one else has started a thread on the subject already); one idea per thread, please.
If you have other questions about the New Features Program (not answered on the New Features Program page), please check out the thread on trinity explaining the program.
Update 2007-05-21: Showing some additional menus even when all windows are closed is also on the list now, another improvement to take more of Windows out of NeoOffice. 
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04.22.07
Posted in Links, Open Source at 9:40 pm by Smokey
The developer(s) of Handbrake (an open-source application for converting DVD content to MPEG-4, e.g., for iPod Video or AppleTV) have written up a nice guide for end-users as to what open-source software is and isn’t.
By and large, the post is an appropriate characterization of every open-source project in existence, and it certainly is completely correct for 95% of all open-source projects out there (most of which are small single-programmer affairs). There are a few well-known software projects to which the entire post does not apply completely (corporate-sponsored OSS projects that are open-source in order to harness the “community” to improve the product and the bottom line, and projects that fall a little closer towards some manner of “cater[ing] to the needs, whims, or desires of end-users”), but even in these cases, the formula set out by the Handbrake developer(s) is still largely correct from an end-user perspective. If you’re not up for reading the entire post, the two bulleted lists provide a good summary and a quick read.
Since I stumbled upon the post today with some surprise at not having seen it before, and since I liked it so much, I wanted to make a quick post and “do my part” to give it some more exposure. (Who am I kidding? Only Sam reads this —and only to catch my typos.)
Thanks to the Handbrake guys for coming up with this great guide; it’s a must-read, and I wish I had known about it a month ago. If you are someone who uses open-source software, please consider reading it to be your homework assignment for the week.
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04.20.07
Posted in Open Source at 6:33 pm by Smokey
I began this post on 27 March, but due to some interruptions and, well, the month of April 
, finishing it sort-of dragged out.
Today [27 March], NeoOffice turns 2, or specifically, 2.1. It’s actually the third final release of NeoOffice (NeoOffice/J 1.1, NeoOffice 1.2, and now 2.1) but only the second major release. Over a year in development, this is the biggest and best NeoOffice ever, not compromising on its legendary stability while adding a number of the features most requested by NeoOffice users. The release is based on the latest stable OpenOffice.org codebase, 2.1 (which explains what happened to NeoOffice 2.0 “final;” when OpenOffice.org started giving their bug-fix releases new minor-version numbers, we synced the NeoOffice version number so that people don’t get confused about what version of OOo code is being used) and has all of the latest OOo bugfixes. 2.1 also includes code from the ooo-build and the odf-converter project, providing support for Word 2007 import, the only ongoing solution for using Excel VBA macros on the Mac, and some nifty Calc tools like Solver.
More importantly, though, NeoOffice 2.1 is much, much more pleasing to the eye. There are the new file and Akua toolbar icons, Patrick’s Cocoa Open and Save dialogues, and Ed’s amazing Aqua widget work. NeoOffice 2.1 arrives with the NeoWiki in five languages, so that tips, hints, and troubleshooting info is available in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. There is a great community, both at the NeoWiki and in the Trinity forums, that answer questions, write documentation, and generally ensure that anyone who arrives at the forum gets a welcome and helpful advice.
This release is made possible by the hard and creative coding of Patrick and Ed, all of the support, documentation, translation, and artwork from the community members, and the financial support from Early Access Program members and the major anonymous donor. Thanks to all of you for your efforts (especially those of you who had to put up with me at some point during the process ) and congratulations. NeoOffice turns 2(.1), and I’m sure there are more great things ahead.
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04.11.07
Posted in Camino, Life, Open Source at 2:11 am by Smokey
Bugzilla really needs a “blog-like” drafts feature.
I’ve been really busy lately, and with all the flurry of work going on in Cocoa Widgets right now (and with the switch to the Cairo-Cocoa widget toolkit before that), I keep running into bug after bug that I need to file. Unfortunately, filing a good bug report takes a little work—a good description, a simple testcase, and, especially for the Cocoa form controls theming rewrite, comparison screenshots between Camino on the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH and Camino with the new trunk code. It takes 15-20 minutes per bug report to do this, assuming that I don’t stumble upon other bugs in the process—and lately, when I file one bug, I file three. 
So I can’t easily do a bug report in pieces, in five minute blocks (like I write many of my posts here); instead, I have to steal a larger block of time—and hope I haven’t forgotten which bugs or what nuances I need to file in the interim.
I know it’s a pie-in-the-sky request; tracking and preserving drafts of bug reports for hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands (like on bugzilla.mozilla.org), of users would be a massive pain to say the least. But a volunteer QA guy can hope and dream, right (after all, this is افكار واحلام )?
And in the meantime, I’m simply keeping a running list of bugs to file, along with a few of their details, on a page on the Camino wiki. Isn’t the internet grand?
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01.21.07
Posted in Open Source at 11:10 pm by Smokey
(Astute readers will notice there is no “Pretty Pictures” entry. Well, there is, but it’s sitting among the drafts that ran too long and lost focus. Maybe it will appear in the future, but this entry can stand alone without it.)
Dan Bennett’s NeoOffice application icon was recently named “one of the Best Mac Icons ever” (I’m paraphrasing from a post about this; I don’t have the issue myself) by Mac|Life (née MacAddict) magazine. That announcement made all the more timely this subject (one I had been planning on writing about for some time).
While open source developers often get little recognition for all of their hard work, many times the people who spend just as much time getting the images and appearance of an application just right get even less attention. This entry is all about changing that, at least when it comes to the people who have given NeoOffice nothing short of a complete visual makeover.
Dan’s icon (and new splash screen and about box image for NeoOffice/J 1.1) were the first steps in making the imagery in NeoOffice more palatable for users.
The icon went from this:
To this:
Even at the 16×16 size, recognizability remains
The next big step in the NeoOffice “makeover” was the Aqua widget work begun in late 2005 and debuting in spring 2006, when Ed banished all of the ugly Windows-like buttons, checkboxes, and so forth and replaced them with the beautiful blue buttons Mac users have come to expect (compare this with this), and Patrick similarly banished the wretched OpenOffice.org Open & Save dialogues and replaced them with the normal Mac ones.
Along with that work came new document icons (and splash screen and about box image) from Daniel Pimley, which improved tremendously upon the document icons that I had created (which had been in use since NeoOffice/J 0.8). “Tremendously” really doesn’t go far enough, as the only thing my icons had going for them was that they were largely created in NeoOffice/J itself
NeoOffice/J 0.8 icons in the top row, NeoOffice/J 1.1 icons in the middle row, and NeoOffice 2.0 icons in the bottom row
All of this beautification left one area remaining (besides the grey color and general poor UI choices of the OpenOffice.org developers) as a sore thumb: the icons on the toolbars and throughout the application. NeoOffice 2.1 will address that, at long last. For the past year or so, Armando Nava (better known in NeoOffice circles as “Punto Mac”) has been slaving over hundreds of millions of pixels, working on creating more Mac-like replacements for the several thousand icons used inside the application (there are 7,225 icons are in the .zip file used by the program). Although NeoOffice 2.1 won’t have all seven thousand icons replaced, a great many of them have been redone in the Akua style, thanks to the hard work of Armando (with help from Daniel Pimley and Oscar Van Vliet), but most of the main toolbar icons in each of the NeoOffice components will be the Akua icons.
NeoOffice 1.2 (Writer) toolbar icons in the top row, NeoOffice 2.0 with stock OpenOffice.org toolbar icons in the middle row, and NeoOffice 2.0 with Akua toolbar icons in the bottom row—although, truly, like all Mac icons, the Akua icons look best at a slightly larger size, so set your toolbars to large when NeoOffice 2.1 comes out
So let this be a small shout of appreciation for the hard work of our graphic artists, toiling night after night among the pixels to make our open source applications look a bit more at home on our Mac desktops and in our Docks 
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