KOffice 2.2 Release Schedule

One of the outcome of the meeting in Oslo was to take the final decision on the KOffice 2.2 release schedule. Following the current trend of a six months release schedule, therefor the 2.2 RC1 is planned for April, 27th 2010.

We have also decided to experiment with a shorter release schedule for 2.3, which is likely to happen four months after 2.2. This will be made possible with the use of Git, and if we manage to keep the release branch in a releasable state at all time, meaning no tests failures, and that features are only merged when finished.

KOffice Fall Meeting 2009 – Day 2

People are almost already gone, or are about to leave (myself I am leaving the office in an hour or so). The office is getting empty, the discussion are fading away. But today, started by a presentation from Jos of strigi fame on a metadata project for KWord and KOffice, and a proof of concept implementations of ODF 1.2 metadata, and how to use nepomuk. This trigger a discussion between him and Pierre on a design that could work for change tracking and metadata in the KOffice text library.

The last main topic was about making KOffice ready for end-users. And we decided to define a few use cases with an associated users for each application. And then list the features they need, and what kind of issues they face. While Krita is getting focused on being useful for the artist behind Blender movies. Of course, the biggest challenge is now to find developers resources to implement all this ideas and fixes.

This was the last topic on the general session. Afterward hacking started again, as well as specific discussion between a small group of developers. For instance, the Krita team (or what was left of it after the departure of Dmitry) started a discussion on redesigning our painting operation settings, which are currently a bit messy between GUI elements, and settings used for painting.

And now people are either gone, compiling KOffice on windows or almost asleep.

KOffice Fall Meeting 2009 – Day 1

Yesterday was the first day of the meeting, we had a lot of discussions going on. It started with the move to git, when, what and how ? We decided for a list blocker, and to do the conversion as soon as this blockers were solve, this include solving some of the issues that KDE face for the conversion.

Then we decided to have the 2.2 release on a six monthes schedule, with a release in May, and to experiment a short 4 monthes schedule for 2.3. To be efficient such a schedule require a move to Git, and the ability to work on different branches and only merge what is ready. The main objection to such a schedule was whether it is not too many releases for end users, the advantage is that we solve the problem of schedules alignment with distributions.

Then we had a presentation from the Nokia guys on their work on an Office viewer for Maemo, what they achieved and what they need to have fixed (just 600 bugs…) to consider it end-user ready. And then we talk on how to integrate their work in the community.

Then we went for sandwiches at the Nokia cafeteria.

We started the afternoon with a discussion on how to improve decision making inside the community. The important thing is that we want to take decisions based on a concensus, which require to have people working on finding a solution instead of defending their current solution. But in the end, if there is still a disagreement, we decided that shared component (library and base plugins) would have three maintainers that take the final decision.

In the afternoon, Olivier Goffart gave a presentation on library design, which is interesting since we are planning to export some of our libraries and offer API/ABI stability.

Then we had hacking times, with people fixing bugs, talking design and other discussing on our library organisation.

Then we were invited by Nokia for a pizza party at a nearby restaurant. And concluded the evening with a Krita meeting in the lobby of the hotel.

KOffice Fall Meeting 2009 – Day 0

So I have arrived in Oslo for the KOffice Sprint. We are gathering in the Trolltech headquarter, currently waiting for people to arrive before going to have dinner in the center. Casual discussions have already started about moving to git, about network issues, graphical user interface, distribution flameware. And also doing some hacking.

The topic of the meeting is mostly about finalizing the KOffice libraries, with API reviews with Qt Developers, probably some bug fixing and unit testing. As well as a few “administrative” discussion, like release schedules.

KOffice 2.1 is released, how user ready it is ?

Yesterday, we released KOffice 2.1, the first major release in the 2.x cycle. It brings many improvements over 2.0, providing a much more stable and rich full experience, you can read more details in the 2.1 release announcement.

While 2.0 was clearly a developer release for developer, and for testing. For 2.1, we concentrated on fixing bugs, fixing some of the annoying issues, 2.1 is coming with many improvements in the MS Office filters, but 2.1 is still lacking in many area, for instance 2.1 comes with experimental support for displaying tables and formulas, but there is no support for editing them. Also there are still many rough edge in the UI. But the progress from 2.0 are astonishing, helped by the good base libraries (Qt, KDE and koffice), external help (Kevin Otten’s student and now Nokia).

While, in general, KOffice 2.1 is still not recommended for end-users. There are two exceptions, the first one is Karbon, while far to be feature full, is starting to become a very capable vector drawing editor, in 2.1 it get support for filters (only blur in 2.1, more is coming for 2.2). I personally use it a lot these days to create illustration for my thesis work. And Krita has made big progress in stability, with dozens of crash fixes for 2.1, and also include many of the new fun painting operation from Lukas, improvement in brush dynamic, recording of filters to create macro…

Inserting shapes/images in KOffice

A while ago, in a praise of karbon 2.0 I wrote, someone commented on the “lack” of tools in karbon, as opposed to inkscape. And from forum posts, or identi.ca, it seems to cause some confusions. For instance, there is no rectangle or circle tool in karbon. And there will never be. The reason is that for KOffice 2, the tools are meant for user interraction, and for manipulating object in the canvas. Inserting shapes is done through the “Add shape” docker, which allow to manager your collection of customs shapes, as well as standard shapes, you can then just drag and drop the shape, or select a shape and then by clicking and dragging on the canvas you can select the size of the shape like with a tool. Once the shape is on the canvas you can go to the toolbox and start having fun with your shape.

And of course, since the technology is shared, you add shapes to other KOffice application in the same way. To add a text in Krita ? Go to the add shape docker, drag and drop, and enjoy ! To add an image to your presentation in KPresenter ? Go to the add shape docker, drag and drop, and enjoy ! To add a smiley to KWord… you get it !