LibreOffice: First Goals after Forking

Submitted by txwikinger on Fri, 11/12/2010 - 08:50

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According to golem.de, a German IT news magazine, the Document Foundation has announced its first goals for the office suite LibreOffice. The dependency of Java shall be reduced and a general refactoring of all components is in the plans.

The number of developers has risen to over 90, which is far more than OpenOffice had.

LibreOffice 3.3, based on OOo 3.3 will be the first "flavour" of a long term strategy. Every module will undergo major rewrites, beginning with Calc, which will receive a new engine called Ixion, given it increased performance and more versatility for macros.

Writer's layouts will be improved as well as Impress' slideshow capabilities. With all the efforts, there will be a focus to maintain compatibility with other office suits, however, this will not stop major innovations in this area.

Italo Vignoli says, that instead of focusing on features, the user will be the centre of attention in the further development of this office suite.

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Comments

Anonymous (not verified)

Fri, 11/12/2010 - 09:09

The announcement was made by the mailing list announce@documentfoundation.org.

txwikinger

Fri, 11/12/2010 - 09:18

There is a link to the announcement in the mailing list in this article.

A_Pickle (not verified)

Fri, 11/12/2010 - 14:03

Hi there. I'm no developer (yet - hoping to learn in school this spring), but I AM an internet user with opinions. :D

Anyways, one of my big sticking points in this internetted world of ours is the increasing over-reliance on OTHER people's servers -- Google is a great example. While there are some services that undeniably need large datacenters in order to be possible (global mapping and search services come to mind), there are some that do not. Google Docs and Microsoft Office Live are two prime examples of services that needn't be hosted on servers outside of my control in order for me to gain the benefits of them.

A locally-hosted WebUI, offering the same features and functionality as Google Docs, would be awesome. It'd free people from having to entrust the security of their documents to a large, profit-driven company with employees that most users have never met without losing any functionality (and, in fact, gaining functionality relative to other mainstream Office suites). Ever seen uTorrent? It has a WebUI. Something like that. :D

I long used Microsoft Office until I freed myself from their shackles by getting BirdieSync -- allowing me to synchronize my Windows Mobile calendar and my contact list to my local installation of Mozilla Thunderbird with the Mozilla Lightning calendar add-on. This freed me from Outlook, and the rest of Microsoft Office. It would be nice to see some integration between LibreOffice and Mozilla Thunderbird + Lightning, which is (I think) the best open-source alternative to Outlook on the market. Being able to do things like pull contact addresses from Thunderbird in the same fashion that Word can pull contact addresses from Outlook to make address labels from Avery sticker sizes, etc.

Alex Ruddick (not verified)

Mon, 11/15/2010 - 15:58

Have you heard of Abiword? (http://www.abisource.comg/) It's rather light-weight, but can do at least as much as Google Docs. However, you can collaborate with other users without using a third party's servers. (There is also the option of using a server for those who trust the developers).

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