Plan-B for Software Documentation

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.

Here are the new screencast video topics for he week beginning August 27th. We did continue to concentrate on creating database applications with OpenOffice.org Base.

In some of the topics we create, rename, delete and manipulate "database objects". This is a generic term for table, form, view, query or report.

• How to open a generic database object using the toolbar,
• How to rename a generic database object using the toolbar,
• How to delete a generic database object using the toolbar,
• How to edit a generic database object using the toolbar,
• How to denife a new relationship between two tables,
• How to use the design view to create a new query,
• How to use the sql view to create a new query,
• How to add an extra field to a query,
• How to open the results of a query,
• How to copy a query to the clipboard,
• How to paste a query after cut or copy,
• How to rename query,
• How to resize a form element,
• How to rename a form from the application,
• How to delete a form from the application,
• How to access a form for data entry from the context menu,
• How to use a form to edit data records,
• How to enter new records into a table.
• How to delete a table row or record.

In addition we added new glossary entries for database table, form, form wizard, electronic form, database form, database form, table, database table, database record, field label, table-wizard.

This brings Plan-B for OpenOffice.org to 40 screencast videos for OpenOffice.org Base and 204 Open Office glossary terms.

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.

On the GullFoss blog, Matthias Mueller-Prove has bravely assembled a nice graphic of users in the various OpenOffice.org sub projects. Makes for a great graphic and on first blush one does think it does tell you something.

However, Matthias immediately came under critic that the number of members signed up in the OpenOffice.org project website tells little about involvement and most likely contains a load of “dead” members. and Matthias readily admitted that this might be so. He volunteered to assemble a similar graphic with better data if someone could point to a better metric. If you have an idea, please help him out.

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 Linux distributer TurboLinux has announced it will participate in the project to convert ODF files into MS Office 2007 compatible versions. TurboLinux will offer its expertise in Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese for converting documents.

The ODF converter is a Microsoft sponsored open source project that wants to bridge the interoperability gap between the new ISO standard format ODF and the proprietary world of MS Office. Its development is behind the abilities of Sun’s MS Office plug-in, only supporting text documents at this time. However it supports Office 2007.

If you are a Writer, using OpenOffice.org as you main tool, Dimitri Popov’s “Writer for Writers and Advanced Users” might be the book for you to read. And Dimitri does know his OpenOffice, as he also publishes the “WriterTools” extension. WriterTools in version 0.7.1 includes features such as:

• Lookup Tool - select text and lookup it up in several online references, including Cambridge Dictionaries, WordNet, and Google Define.
• Google Translate - select text and translate it to different languages using the Google Translate service.
• Email Backup - Backup your currently open document per E-Mail.
• Multi-format Backup macro - saves the currently open text document Writer) as Word, RTF, and TXT formats in one command.
• Open FTP Document - open a document stored on an FTP server and work on it locally.
• Convert to DokuWiki converts the current document into DokuWiki format.
• Start/Stop Timer - keep track how long you work on which document and save the data in the accompanying WriterDB database. Use it as you please, such as for billing etc.

This set of tools utilizes the new OpenOffice.org extension infrastructure. Which seems to gain momentum in general.

I find the DokuWiki macro real nifty. I bet, if it would be MediaWiki as output, a lot of Wikipedia authors would become OOo converts.

Plan-B for OpenOffice.org celebrates the milestone of 100 help topic screencasts for OpenOffice.org Writer.

This week we added some topics around paragraph formatting and using tab stops. The latest batch contains the following help topics:

• Insert new tab stop
• Remove tab stop
• Understanding tab stop types
• Change tab stop type of existing tab stop
• Change tab stop type for new tab stops
• Setting multiple tab stops
• Insert tab stop fill characters

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.