Blog plugin released

Finally got around to releasing the blog plugin. The build on the build server completed successfully. The package should be available in the repositories in a little while is available in the repositories. The package is called "freoffice-blog-plugin".

Turns out the problem with the images I mentioned in the earlier blog, is not a problem with plugin at all. The plugin is working as it was expected to. The problem was with how images were handled in the document.

So go ahead and install it. If you encounter any problems, feel free to contact me. :)

FreOffice Blog Plugin - FOBlog

Finally! The blog plugin is almost ready for use. Only one big bug remains. More about the bug later.
The FreOffice Blog plugin (FOBlog), enables blogging to Wordpress and Blogger blogs from within FreOffice. What makes it different from other blogging tools, is that it extracts content from an already existing ODT file and posts it to the blog. A nice user interface is provided to make things easier for the user as well. All the user needs to do is,
1.Create a new document in FreOffice
2. Save the document
3. Open the blog plugin.
4. Click on New Post
5. Select the ODT file and enter required details.
6. Click on post.
7. Done!!
The blog plugin opens the file, extracts its content, uploads images if any and then posts it to the blog. This post, was done from the plugin itself.
The features supported by FOBlog are.
1. Posting to WordPress & Blogger platforms.
2. Image support for both Wordpress & Blogger
3. Support for multiple accounts on either platform.
4. Encrypted storage of user details. This is shared with the online services plugin.
There are some shortcomings as well. FOBlog does not retain most of the formatting of the text in document. And also there is the big bug I mentioned earlier. All the images in a document, no matter where they occur in the document, appear at the top. As they have in this post.
Barring those short comings, FOBlog is ready for use. Look for it in a few days in the maemo repositories.

Digitally signed documents an ODF1..2 Feature in Freoffice

Digitally signed documents in the FreOffice which was demonstrated at the ODF inter-operability event at Budapest, Hungary last week, Take a look at the demo of this here:



 
This work was done by Sugnan Prabhu with a helping hand from Jos Vandenoever in a very time frame of 2.5 weeks this work was completely flawlessly !! Great Job Sugnan and Jos !!

FreOffice at Open Office Conference in Budapest, Hungary.

Freoffice is @ the 10th Anniversary of Open Office Conference here at Budapest, Hungary.

Freoffice will take part in ODF 1.2 Inter-operability demo event were we will showcase few new features and demo the only ODF based Mobile Office suite to inter-operate with other Office Suites and in addition we will also demonstrate the brand new features of Freoffice where it supports ODF1.2 features such as :
A. RDF for metadata representation . This feature will have in addition an integration to mobile enablers such as being able to make a call or send an email directly from the office documents and
B. Ability to view digitally signed documents.
Notes: Videos of these are already posted in this blog few days/week ago if you are interested to see what it is about.

Will share the slides which will be used during the demo.

If you are at the event do not miss out participating to the demo session !!

RDF metadata supporting coming into Freoffice

Metadata in office documents are represented by RDF  according to Open Document Formats ODF1.2 office document standards.

Imagine you are reading a document and you decide to call a person discussed in the document. well it would be easy if this follows a standard way of representing metadata data about people, location, events, etc.


So here here is a nice demo developed by Sugnan Prabhu in a very short time span  with the help from Jos Vandenoever, great work guys !!



It is particularly very valuable for mobile use case as while you are on the go you can initiate a call, send SMS back to the author to do changes to the document or provide feedback based on the track changes on.

Watch this space for more such innovations but please note not all of them might actually realise soon.

Freoffice can be used with multiple languages, check out the virtual keyboard inbuilt

You can write in multiple languages in Freoffice. Check out the Video here:



In the next release you should be able to utilise this keyboard where you can pick which language you would like to write in and start typing in your language of choice. For now we have only few languages hardcoded in the 2.2.9 release available from maemo extras devel repository for Maemo. The Keyboard is developed as a technical feasibility and is not yet designed for best usability hence it is hidden in the current user interface.

In order to try it out open a document go into edit mode and use the "CNTRL+K" key combination to try out the keyboards. You can infact even write in 2 - 5 languages as you see in the video demo :-)

We are interested to see more languages to be added to freoffice, your contributions are warmly welcome, just join us at #freoffice IRC channel in freenode. If you want your favourite language you are welcome to contribute just appear in the IRC channel and join us make this exciting project fun developing :-) Welcome onboard..

Freoffice Last week taking a short break before making a big release

Last we had a short break from a busy schedule of  implementing new features in Freoffice @ Bangalore, India. We will soon make a new release with most fixes to bugs spotted by  the early users from maemo garage. 

We also have a lot of cool features cooking in Freoffice project which are scheduled in the next release. all feature put together should make the FreOffice application the most comprehensive mobile office suite. Lets see until we hear from you atleast thats what we think about it. Next Release will be made as soon as we are happy with the fixes and think it is good to use by you. Meanwhile we get it ready for your use please bear with us.

Anyway about our dinner evening, we were probably the only table who had 17 N900's on the table in India :-) having dinner together and trying out the freoffice features at the dinner table.  Thanks mani for finding us a good restuarant !!

You might find some familiar faces, sorry the quality of the picture did not turn out very good.

FreOffice Editor Alpha release statistics

After yet another alpha 2 release of Freoffice was done in July this time we saw a larger number of downloads ~3500+. We spotted a number of usability issues and bugs based on the discussion with the people who have tried to use the unstable release. http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=58342.

We are now working on fixing the biggest issues stopping people from using Freoffice.

The next version should be a bit better with the fixes in addition to many new features. Hope we are able to do this soon enough. Watch this space. The goal is anyway to see if we can bring the quality to a level that we can move the software from Maemo Extras Devel to maemo Extras as soon as possible.

Online Services plugin for FreOffice

Hey, there I'm Kaushal. I'm another intern working on FreOffice here at Nokia. I have been tasked with writing plugins for enabling online services in FreOffice. The first part of this project was to do a plugin for online document sharing & storage services like Google Documents & SlideShare. The second part is a blogging plugin.
The first part is done and will be released soon. Once you install this plugin in your Maemo device and open FreOffice, you will get a new button in the menu.

Click on this to launch the login screen. Now select a service, enter your username and password and sign in.

After a sucessful login, you will get a dialog with a list of all the documents, presentations & spreadsheets.


Now, you can select a file and click on download to download the file, or click on upload to launch the upload dialog through which you can upload files to the selected service.


As you can see, only Google Docs and SlideShare are supported right now. And not all files can be uploaded as well. Right now SlideShare supports upload of almost all types of office files. But Google Documents supports uploads of ODT, DOC, ODS, XLS and PPT. And Google Docs upload fails sometimes due to an internal error on Google's side.

In downloads, if downloading from SlideShare, the file will be downloaded in the format it was uploaded. From Google Documents, text documents are downloaded as ODT, spreadsheets as ODS and presentations as PPT. If there are other files in Google Docs, they will be downloaded in their original format.

Here are some more screenshots of the plugin.

Upload dialog for Google Docs, after completion of an upload.



During a download,


After the completion of a download,


I plan to add more services to the plugin later on, after the first version of the blog plugin is out. If anyone has suggestions for this please tell me.

Presentations from your mobile - leaving your laptop where it belong on the desk :-)

Imagine making presentation you dont need to carry your laptop anymore. Yes with N900 having TV/Out capabilities this is exactly what you can do , keep all your documents in teh device and just using the TV/out cable to connect to the dataprojector and make your presentation. if you want to use your laptop yes you can also connect from the N900 over local network and make presentations. Anyway here is demo
Thanks to Sugnan to make this video and the work done so far this is going to make you view thumbnails and quickly switch between pages and move them incase you decide during your commute to your presentation and make last moment changes. I am excited with this as it will help me a lot as soon as it is ready for use(which is planned soonish now, ready when it is ready nor promises from us yet on this.)


Sounds interesting join us and contribute to make this happen on #Freoffice or #KOffice. Leave your comments or feedback here

Wireless-The way to go

While the work on FreOffice editor was going on, I(Gopalakrishna) and Sugnan Prabhu had a interesting task on hand, we had to put together a remote presentation assistant for FreOffice-KOffice. We planned that in addition to allowing the presenter(user) to remotely control the slide movements we will add remote file transfer, facility for viewing notes, remote pen and highlight tools. Remote pen and highlight tools allows the presenter to draw or highlight on the maemo device and he/she would see the corresponding actions replicated on the projected presentation.

Enabling remote presentation on FreOffice-KOffice involved implementing the highlight and pen tools for FreOffice. Here is the screen shot of the highlight and pen tools running on the N900. These tools are available in the recently released FreOffice version.

The task also involved implementing the communication between the N900 and Desktop/Laptop. This task went on smoothly, thanks to the guidance from Boudewijn Rempt, Thorsten Zachmann and others from the KOffice community. Also suggestion from people here at Nokia; Suresh Chande, Mani and others was of immense help.

The image below is a screen shot of the file transfer taking place between the N900 and the Desktop/Laptop running KPresenter. Also a screen shot of the dialog listing the available devices is given below.

The remote presentation assistant on the desktop is below

Freoffice Viewer a short demo

Here is a short video of how the Freoffice viewer only functionality looked like early this year



and then now how it matured from "Freoffice Viewer"  to "Freoffice"  based a  lot of contribution received by a group of students from India who turned with the viewer into an editor partly. Currently editing capabilities have been extended to only Open Documents Formats for Presentations and Documents. Spreadsheet is in the pipeline and will come very soon.



This is exciting times for Freoffice with a lot of features being developed which will also come out very soon. All the development is happening in the open interested on what is happening or yourself have an idea and would like to contribute join our discussions in #freoffice channel in Freenode IRC servers. ping us there.

Any comments add them here to our blog

Launching FreOffice blog

Its been almost 1 year now since the Freoffice work began when we started in Berlin right after the KOffice sprint and it has been a great year with a lot of excitement and running to do along with the community in bringing the Open Source Mobile office out ready to try for early enthusiast.

First version of Freoffice was made available in January 2010 and it had a couple of minor updates during this period. The statistics of the download of the Freoffice seems promising and certainly there is lot more under the hood which has happened with Freoffice.

We got a lot of feedback when we were at CEBIT showcasing Freoffice, such as:
- Request to enable editor even if it supports only ODF and not Microsoft formats
- UI Enhancements suggestions
- Many visitors to the booth liked just the name of the application freoffice :-)

So from here we really took it serious and started of exploring how to take this further and move the mobile office to a direction where no office has gone before and we ended up with a number of ideas. Theses ideas were given to group of students who really got excited and are coming out really new enhancements to the Freoffice.

Office Editor:

1. Office editor is almost there and ready for use now
2. The N900 is really cool with its TV Out functionality one could really use different tools while presenting for the starters we have the capability to sketch on top of the presentation and also point to a specific portion of the screen to keep your audience focus.

What else ? there is a lot more happening on this side, more in the following posts by the Freoffice contributors

Have some comments or would like to contribute, just wait for few more posts you will get more details how to contribute. Just join the KOffice community and start to contribute towards Freoffice