Surfing Safari

ok - I might be the only one, likely to read this, old enough to remember that song - not just having heard it, but hearing it over the air waves, new.

Perhaps anyway - catching a wave, hanging ten or just being part of the 'boob tube' generation..this reminded me of the song..




although this guy really needs to pick up the pace..*smile*

Down to the bare knuckles…

cut the blarney, raw competition.

FOSS projects can build products that deliver value to the user on par with, or better then, closed commercial – old school – businesses!

First time I heard a remark with the above sentiment I was doubtful….and I went along my merry way in life.

At some point round or about five years ago, hearing it again (and not the second time) I took a bit more notice. Actually a good bit more notice.

What got me to stop and consider? Ubuntu and OpenOffice.org

The first because it installed and ran on my PC, easy.

The second because it installed and ran on my PC easy, twice :>)

hmmm – actually that isn’t exactly correct – Ubuntu installed easily and ran acceptably on a friends PC.

OpenOffice.org installed easily and ran acceptably on my PC under Windows and Ubuntu, allowing me to help my friend transition from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org in her daily computer usage needs.

She, was happy and I was happy that she was happy.

Well, it seems that a lot of folks are starting to feel the same – a recent estimate put 13% of Windows PC users as having OpenOffice.org, and even the, IMO, conservative OO.o PR Chief has claimed 10% of computer desktops overall.

Nothing however speaks to the successes of the FOSS projects, large and small, then the reactions of the predominant commercial player.

Whether in speeches to their resellers or this latest marketing campaign –

TEN BUCKS - if your employer has a site license..

they say one thing….the US market is in play.

Drew

Today (10-13-2009)

(10-13-2000)
StarOffice Code Released in Largest Open Source Project

Phipps has his own thoughts on the future of OpenOffice.org. He sees this project as a way to leverage the open source model onto the desktop for not just Linux, but other platforms as well, including Windows and PDAs. The latter may not be so far-fetched, as the first topic of discussion on the OpenOffice.org Whiteboard is "Personal Digital Assistants and OpenOffice."

(Brian Proffitt)

'So they say it's your Birthday...life is a gas...'

Nine Years and a few days ago...

The Story of the GNOME project

The GNOME Foundation

.....
..... After the foundation was announced, a number of initiatives from the founding members was announced:

• Sun Microsystems adopts GNOME technologies for their user environment in the Solaris OS.
• Hewlett-Packard adopts GNOME for their user environment in the HP-UX operating system.
• Sun will port their recently OpenSourced StarOffice suite to the Gtk+ toolkit and will integrate with the GNOME Bonobo component architecture.
• IBM contributed the SashXB rapid development environment to GNOME.
• GNOME would adopt and integrate Mozilla as part of its desktop strategy.
• The GNOME project would adopt OpenOffice technologies.

.....
.....

Next...( ? )

Android and ODF ( Take Two )....not so bleak

Well this is going to make you laugh - did me anyway.

The other day I did a search for "Android ODF" using Google(tm)

Being a normal person I only did a quick scan and found a review / links to packages supporting the reading or reading/writing of MSO formatted files, but not ODF.

Now today I did something similar....but before I say what..

Android and Google have a close relationship... :>/
Google has a document package...duh!
It saves in ODF format....

Alright, so today I did that same search using bing ... Laughing Here ...and I stumble upon:
AndroOffice. How to get a copy... guess one's gotta ask. Of course one might want to actually own a phone first... more laughing.

Dj

Android and ODF

The other day, on the OpenOffice.org blog planet I read Eric Bachard's post regarding a port of the office suite to the Android platform.

The first thought that came to my mind was, cws_odficons.

Ahhh - why that you might ask..read on.

Today did a google for 'Android ODF'...looks bleak.

Which led me to think about the need to expand the ODF ecosystem, which is actually, IMO, what cws_odficons is really all about, and on the need to expand ODF usage I could not agree more. Which in turn brings me back to ...looks bleak.... and that brings me all the way back to Android.

In the update to Eric's post he mentions that one can't really port all of OO.o because of it's C++ nature - ok, so that gets me thinking about this recent blog, Create an OpenOffice.org Java client in a few seconds.

All of which has me thinking - ok, so leave OO.o on the server/ I mean desktop..silly me/ and just think about what a viewer would look like on Android. Later a trimmed down version of an editor.

The education project at OO.o is certainly on this track with OOo4Kids, so Android is perhaps just another step in feature pruning. I say pruning 'cause if, and assuming, I understand this correctly Android will run only a pure java application, no libraries created in C++ at all?

Now there must be some pure Java implementation that can display an ODF file - surely there is - isn't that what the odf toolkit is all about? So there might be a great student sized project here - porting the odf toolkit viewer to Android, making it assesible from the Android emial reader for attached ODF files.

It is not insignifigant, I believe, that in the above paragraph the word OpenOffice.org is not present. That fact is what makes my, sometimes quirky, mind associate blogs about cws_odficons and Android.

A project within the education project such as this would benefit OO.o for sure and would be benefited by association with the OO.o developers, it also benefits users of any ODF compliant application, that includes users of MSO and we need that because in the end real competition in the desktop office suite market will not happen until the percentage of ODF formatted files being created approaches parity.

Well, enough for now...hmm, something new to add to the mix JopenDocument.

Till next time,

Dj