Plan-B for Software Documentation

I never cared for Hotmail, the Microsoft online mail account. I always found it not very user friendly. Hotmail was bought by Miscrosoft in 1997 to compete with the then dominant online mail provider Yahoo! Now, Sabeer Bhatia one of Hotmails founders, has launched an new venture in Online Office document software, called Live-Documents.

Mr. Bhatia is Chairman of Bangalore based, InstaColl and wants to compete with Google, Microsoft, Adobe and many others with a browser based application to create, edit and manage office documents. Documents can be shared with anyone who has an e-mail for notification of changes and edited online in a Adobe Flex based application. Live documents also supports off line work on documents through a plugin for MS Office 2003. The company also plans support for Open Office as well as a Flash based local client program from the company itself. Offline documents are synced back to the central service ASAP. The storage server allows light document management services such as permissions to edit or print a document as well as attaching workflow tasks like review and approval.

The new service is available on an invitation only preview basis. The company plans to offer free service for personal use and business use for a fee.

Today I had to read a proud account of Plaxo that its new Plaxo Pulse Web 2.0 networking platform has seen a traffic surge since it announced to offer the OpenSocial API.

My personal experience with Plaxo Stream is rather negative. For several weeks now Thomas Power, Chairman at Ecademy and Owner, Ecademy.com sends to my Plaxo account and my Inbox messages reading:

Thomas Power shared something with the Jon… Network group.

You can view it here: http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/events/…/

Thanks!
The Plaxo team

I don’t find this funny in any way. It is plain and simple spam. I don’t know the guy and as a spammer I will certainly not network with him.

Plaxo, fix your spamming issue and while you are at it fix your broken plugin for Thunderbird, which produces duplicates, if you want to do some good for your services.

Today I visited the Sun Tech Days Boston for day number one. Sun Microsystems put on a big program at the downtown Sheraton hotel with three major tracks:

• NetBeans and various Java related technologies
• OpenSolaris and its community
• University a cross section for students, introductions to almost every Sun developer technology

I peaked in to the introductions for OpenSolaris. What I and a moderate crowd listened too was core developers who focused on the developing community of OpenSolaris and how it becomes more than Sun employees developing with everybody else watching. In many ways OpenSolaris does catch up with many other *nix like OS distribution. The word “modernize” was used often in describing the efforts to create new installers,
updated shells, new packaging system, more drivers, etc. OpenSolaris really seams to be a train picking up steam.

I was surprised, how undecided the road map was for the various projects and initiatives. It often was unclear when a certain feature would arrive in which release of OpenSolaris or Solaris the commercial distribution of Sun Microsystems. As an engineer I like things to be finished and done right, instead of rushed to meet a deadline. But from the business perspective, it is not a good thing, that many processes, and I mean decision processes, are not yet decided on. I’m well familiar with such mixed messages from the OpenOffice/StarOffice project, I’m more involved with. If I would meet Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, I’d let him know that Sun’s positioning of the commercial Sun products versus the open source products is not clear and that it is hurting Sun.

Back to the Java track, where I peaked into sessions about Ajax frameworks and upcoming Swing technologies. It appears Sun does not take sides with the various Ajax frameworks, other than trying to support them all in NetBeans. NetBeans 6.0 impressed me with its ability to not just syntax color and code assist but also to have many wizards that generate code for your from a few questions. This was especially apparent in the session about Swing Application Framework and Java Beans Binding. NetBeans supports these brand new frameworks with code generation that can rival Ruby on Rails scaffolding, although for pure Java apps.

Speaking of Ruby on Rails, or better Jruby on Rails. This session was rather disappointing, as the speaker was jsut a few days into Ruby and Rails and basically did talk about her own excitement about a dynamic language and the impressive meta programming Rails style. I would have hoped for more hard facts on how JRuby does vs native Ruby and what the challenges are and how they are overcome.

As you can see it was a busy day, and the program only started in the afternoon. I look forward to tomorrow.

Most users know that Sun Microsystems is the main force behind OpenOffice.org and its development community. Historically they did buy StarDivision and release Open Office as open source. Today, IBM announced to commit to the OpenOffice.org development community with a team of 35 developers in China working full time on the project. IBM also contributed today a chunk of code making the open source office suite more accessible for users with disabilities.

While IBM has developed the accessibility interface called iAccessible2 for a while and also supported ODF (ISO 26300) in its Lotus Notes products, this announcement is a long term commitment to develop OpenOffice.org as a competitive suite.

NeoOffice just announced its latest release 2.2.1. All over the net is praise for NeoOffice’s new features, such as

• Support for the native Mac OS X spellchecker
• Support for the native Mac OS X address book
• Support for high resolution printing
• Reading and writing many Microsoft OOXML (Office 2007) Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents
• The latest features from OpenOffice.org 2.2.1

While OpenOffice.org announced a native version for the Mac OS X and its user interface, and Sun Microsystems committed two full time developers to the project, NeoOffice has obviously worked hard to stay ahead. The integration of native features such as the address book and spell checker are certainly welcome. It makes working on a Mac much more consistent.

However, some report issues with this version of NeoOffice 2.2.1. I have no way to verify that.

The competing effort from the mother project seems to make good progress with frequent OOo Mac OS X port developer snapshots. However, I don’t think the upcoming release as part of OOo release 2.3 will be as comprehensive as NeoOffice yet. I guess competition does improve the product(s) for consumers. I applaud both efforts.

If you always wanted to extend OOo with your features, Open Office 2.3 will make you a happy developer.

Kai Sommerfeld, just blogged about the latest features for OpenOffice.org extension developers. I must say many seem essential to make more than tricial extensions:

• Extending preference dialogs
• Extending menus and toolbars
• Link to the "official" Open Office extension repository from the repository manager

Be aware that this is hot of the pressses for developers. All this will only be working for ordinary users with the release of Open Office 2.3 this fall. This includes the extension repository, which is still in beta testing.

In addition, Sun also released its 1.0 version of the OpenOffice.org API plugin for Netbeans its IDE. Developers will clearly rejoyce with the next release and I’m looking forward to a vibrant extension infrastructure that makes OOo even more useful.

I currently happen to be with my Laptop in Barcelona, Spain. However, my PC is set up en_US with US time zone, etc. Now for Google I seem to have become a Spaniard now. When I type in www.google.com I get redirected to www.google.es, when I search something in the Firefox searchbar I get results from www.google.es. When I go to websites that serve Google AdSense, I get served Spanish advertisements.

This is nuts, because I do not speak Spanish and I can’t read it and my browser is set to the languages en, en_US, ge and pt. So no Spanish. And the site I visit, the business network LinkedIn is only available in English. So why is Google serving me like I’m a native, just because my IP address is currently in Spain?

Can anybody tell me how this is useful for me (do NO evil) or for the advertisers (do NO evil)?

In my book this is evil. It breaks the HTTP protocol, because that says the browser does determine what languages it prefers to accept and not Google or its misguided idea of localization. If they want to show me advertisement that are local to my location, fine. But please in a language that I do understand. Otherwise Google is waisting its ad space.

The developers of OpenOffice.org have implemented some major improvement of memory usage for OpenOffice.org Calc. In their sample spreadsheet it reduces the overall memory requirement by 28%. I have some users of OOo complain to me that Calc could not handle very large spreadsheet and it so it was very slow. This could be a major step to alleviate their pain.

Don’t hold your breath yet, because this improvement will only come to you with release 2.3 planned in September 2007.

According to Susan Lister, OpenOffice.org is a good tool to convert your Powerpoint presentations into good looking web pages.

Susan is dissatisfied with “clunky ‘powerpoint to webpage’ slideshows”, produced by MS Powerpoint. so she looked for a better solution and found it in OpenOffice.org Impress. She discovered:

These experiments showed that I can make a better web page set up using Open Office - my final website was a smaller file size as well as smaller in the amount of screen real estate. I liked the fact that html wizard gave me control over whether I wanted frames, show notes included and a title screen as well the size of the final presentation (640×480, 800×600, 1024×768).

Susan discovered, that the HTML web pages created by Impress not only look better but are also smaller by a factor of 10.

Reading the Technology Enhanced Learning blog, today I discovered an open source web conferencing application, called WebHuddle.

To my delight WebHuddle does offer support for OpenOffice.org Impress files to share with the audience.

What type of content may I upload for my meeting?

You may upload any combination of Microsoft Powerpoint files, Open Office Impress files, individual GIF or JPEG images, and ZIP files containing GIF or JPEG images. Note that Powerpoint animations are not visible when displayed in WebHuddle.

WebHuddle is a server centric approach to web conferencing. It server is based on Java servlet technology. The client is a small Java applet of less than 175k. It provides the basic features of sharing presentations, the desktop, files, and interacting with questions to the presenter and questionnaires. Optionally it can add a Voice over IP audio channel. In addition the whole session can be recorded and played back virtually identical.