LibreOffice UI Mockups (with sidebar)

[InstantFundas]

I just thought I'd chime in and say that I did assume they were official mockups because I don't follow LibreOffice close enough to know that documentfoundation.org is the official developer and I didn't think it would be unusual for another website (Web Upd8, which I've never heard of before) to post news about (official) mockups.

It's not uncommon for news blogs to get (sometimes exclusive) screens or information from official sources and report on it. I assumed this was the case with these mockups.

Although if I had bothered to click through to the article and read it, it does make it clear that these are not official. So my ignorance is mostly my own fault.

Since these are just fan-made images I do agree that it changes the discussion somewhat, from "Oh, look what they're considering" to "Oh, look what someone who doesn't necessarily have any influence on the decision thinks they should consider."

-Deozaan (January 24, 2011, 09:37 PM)

Ah! At least someone agrees with me.

[zridling]

Ubuntu follows openSUSE, Redhat, and Fedora in announcing that the distro will use LibreOffice from now on. Woohoo! 
http://www.zdnet.com...cles-openoffice/8122

[Deozaan]

Nice! I was wondering when they'd start including it in the distros. 

[40hz]

Yes. Very good. Especially in the wake of Microsoft, IBM, and the usual  crowd predictably announcing their continued support for Oo and Oracle. And so far, with absolutely no anckowledgement on their part of LibreOffice or the Document Foundation's existence.

They must be Zork fans; "If you can't see the Grue, it can't eat you"  

[zridling]

v.3.3_Stable released yesterday morning and can be downloaded here.
http://arstechnica.c...e-of-libreoffice.ars

TDF got off to a good start and has attracted a lot of enthusiasm from former OOo contributors; Google, Red Hat, Canonical, and Novell are among its corporate supporters. The development effort so far has been reasonably productive. Contributors have been able to enhance LibreOffice with features that Sun had resisted accepting upstream, including parts of Novell's popular Go-OOo patch set. The LibreOffice developers have also incorporated significant improvements taken from the OpenOffice.org 3.3. The new features included in LibreOffice 3.3 improve the office suite's feature set, usability, and interoperability with other formats. For example, it has improved support for importing documents from Lotus Word Pro and Microsoft Works. Another key new feature is the ability to import SVG content and edit SVG images in LibreOffice Draw. Navigation features in Writer have been improved, the thesaurus got an overhaul, and the dialogs for printing and managing title pages got major updates. LibreOffice Calc touts better Excel interoperability and faster Excel file importing. The maximum size of a Calc spreadsheet has increased to 1 million rows.

____________________________
Funny thing: In openSUSE, it automatically deletes OpenOffice when you install LibreOffice unless you check the option to keep OpenOffice. ha!!

[40hz]

(see attachment in previous post)

v.3.3_Stable released yesterday morning and can be downloaded here.
http://arstechnica.c...e-of-libreoffice.ars

-zridling (January 26, 2011, 07:47 AM)

Been using it for a few days now and I'm very happy with it so far. Does seem to be lighter and more responsive. Some minor but nice cosmetic improvements too!  

Note: if you have RC4, it's the same as the final build. Per the LibreOffice website release note for V3.3 Final:

This release is bit-for-bit identical to the Release Candidate 4, so you don't need to download or reinstall if you have that version already.

[JavaJones]

If this signals accelerated dev for the OOo code base (obviously now under the banner of LibreOffice) then I'm thrilled. I've always seen OOo as having tremendous potential but development seemed rather slow considering how much dev and corporate support their was behind the thing. So far LibreOffice seems to have made more improvements faster than OOo ever did, which is promising. I have yet to test it, I think I'll wait for the next major release, but I'm glad this is happening, not just because it was necessitated by the Oracle buy-out, but because OOo was stagnating a bit anyway.

- Oshyan

[zridling]

If this signals accelerated dev for the OOo code base (obviously now under the banner of LibreOffice) then I'm thrilled. I've always seen OOo as having tremendous potential but development seemed rather slow considering how much dev and corporate support their was behind the thing. So far LibreOffice seems to have made more improvements faster than OOo ever did, which is promising. - Oshyan

-JavaJones (January 26, 2011, 12:23 PM)

Exactly! And when you figure most communication is web/network-based rather than in ODF or MS-OOXML formats, there's only so much you can do anymore with a word processor -- especially in the age when few can spell or type more than 140 characters. I mean, who has the time to read 200 characters! v3.3 was for stability; v.3.4 should bring some much wanted new features.
 

[zridling]

Here's a short illustrated article on 3.3's few new features:
http://www.linuxjour...-brings-new-features

[zridling]

It opens in less than a second on my old computer under openSUSE Linux. And the preloader's been gone a while now. I regularly open a 6.2mb spreadsheet file from the desktop and it takes just over a second. No way I can be unhappy with that response. I do hope, though, that if future versions bring "heavy" new features, the user will be able to include/install them modularly. I don't need everything, just Writer, Calc, and Formula.

[40hz]

There's a no-install portable version available for Windows over at www.portableapps.com  

Just added it to my "writing toolkit" for when I need something more heavyweight than Tomahawk or AngelWriter. 

Works very nicely when running of a USB key after a slight startup lag more due to the USB media than anything else. Run from a folder on your hard drive, the "portable" version is very quick to start.

Good stuff!

[Deozaan]

There's a no-install portable version available for Windows over at www.portableapps.com  

-40hz (February 06, 2011, 12:04 PM)

Thanks! I'm adding it to my PortableApps Launcher as we speak.

UPDATE: Ugh! It doesn't work because I store my portable apps in my dropbox and LibreOffice Portable can't run from a directory with a space in it.

I guess I need to reinstall dropbox on all of my machines and customize it to remove that "My" from the directory name...