Toolbar improvements

On Friday, I was able to spend a bit of time on UI hacking which I love. Those small and tiny pieces that when combined, do a big difference - do you remember my GSoC task proposal in this area? ;-) Unfortunately, no student has picked that; but let's see if somebody else gets interested.

This time it was the toolbar's menus. So far those menus were too prominently visible on the toolbar, while not that much used. Additionally, you can get the same functionality as a context menu - when you right-click on the toolbar. Together with our UX guys, we agreed that the best will be to remove them, and show the ">>" marks only when there are hidden toolbar items. You can see the changes on a "Before/After" screenshot:

And how does it look like when there are hidden items:

This will be available in LibreOffice 3.5. There is a small follow-up Easy Hack, see EasyHack: Make the toolbar menu easier. I'll be happy to provide you with details if you want to try this one - just drop me a mail.

LibreOffice build on Windows with ccache for MSVC

I have just revived my 4 years old hack that adds MSVC support to ccache. The use case is a bit limited - you have to use it from inside cygwin; but that is exactly what LibreOffice needs :-) So I have updated LibreOffice's configure.in to be able to handle it well - so far in the libreoffice-3-4 branch, but it will get to master the next time we merge the branch there.

How to use it? Download the ccache.exe binary, put it to eg. your ~/bin (or somewhere else in your PATH), setup the CC and CXX environment variables, and compile as you are used to (./autogen.sh, make, ...), like:

 CC="ccache C:/PROGRA~1/MICROS~1.0/VC/bin/cl.exe" CXX="ccache C:/PROGRA~1/MICROS~1.0/VC/bin/cl.exe" ./autogen.sh make 

And yes, it would be great to do the ccache support as simple as a --enable-ccache configure option - but I did not find time to fine tune it on the other platforms, so I'll go for that only when I find there is a demand for that - drop me a mail ;-)

If you want to have a look at the ccache's statistics, run ccache -s. I've done no measurement how much time it saves overall - if are able to do any, please mail me your results too.

LibreOffice: Zapojte se!

[This blog entry is in Czech, a summary of my talk I had at the openSUSE 11.4 Release Party in Prague.]

Toto je asi první zápis, který píšu česky. A pokud není první, tak ten předchozí jsem musel napsat tak dávno, že si to už ani nepamatuji. Chci se s vámi totiž podělit o své (česky psané) slidy z openSUSE 11.4 Release Party, která byla minulý pátek v hackerspace Brmlab. Bylo nás tam hodně, přitom však tak akorát, abychom se neudusili; však si prohlédněte fotky v Pavlově blogu.

Mluvil jsem o tom, jak se zapojit do LibreOffice (pdf) jako přispěvatel. A šance je jak pro programátory, tak pro překladatele, nebo autory dokumentace, či webových stránek. Nejdůležitější je najít si, co vás baví, a začít. Programátorských úkolů je spousta, vybere si každý. A pokud se jedná o překlady, pošlete mi mail, povím více.

Abych nezapomněl, pro studenty je šance vydělat si přes léto pěkných pár peněz v rámci Google Summer of Code pro LibreOffice. Tak neváhejte, máte ještě týden na to, abyste se zaregistrovali! :-)

FOSDEM 2011: LibreOffice Online Help (Wikihelp)

I realized I did not post my FOSDEM slides online; this blog post is to fix that ;-) So if you want to learn more about our approach to the on-line help, please have a look here:

LibreOffice Online Help (Wikihelp)

It talks briefly about what we have done to bring the LibreOffice help online, and about the future steps. Talking of the future steps, in 3.4, the .xhp files are still the source of the help (check the presentation if you want to know what are the .xhp files), because we did not manage to do the 2nd step - converting the wiki markup back to the native help files.

Actually - I would like to mentor a GSoC task for that:

Convert LibreOffice Help to Platform Specific Help Files

If you are a student interested in Free Software, with free summer, and Python or Perl knowledge (to bind to existing MediaWiki markup parsers), this might be a nice task for you!

LibreOffice GSoC: The UI Cleanup

As you might have heard, LibreOffice has been accepted for this year's Google Summer of Code program. I am a mentor or a co-mentor of several tasks, but one of them is the closest to my heart, and that is the UI Cleanup task.

Please consider applying for it - in the summer time frame, we can do a big change. And it is better than that, this task consists of several smaller sub-tasks, each of them few days to a week long, so you can see the results of your work immediately, and the big change is in fact result of all those smaller fixes 'here and there'.

If you are one of those who looks at the screenshots first, this is a task for you :-)

LibreOffice Findbar improvements

Yesterday I played a bit with the Findbar in LibreOffice, and changed it to look and behave more like in the applications like Firefox, or Evolution:

It is now hidden by default, and opens when you press Ctrl-f (for the old Search and Replace dialog I changed the keybinding to Ctrl-Alt-f), or when you choose Find in the menu. It opens at the bottom of the document, and you can close it again (and return back to the document) by pressing Escape. I also made the text entry wider so that more characters fits in there.

Enjoy! :-) - will be available in LibreOffice 3.4.

LibreOffice Tinderbox moved

If you have read my previous blog about LibreOffice Tinderbox, this is a small update:

• We have moved the tinbuild script to a separate repository, so that the tinbuild can potentially switch branches as necessary.
• Thorsten has also improved the script so that you can send the mails via SSL or TLS thanks to using sendEmail by Brandon Zehm.

If you are still using the old tinbuild, you are encouraged to upgrade :-) The most recent installation instructions are part of the repository now, read them here.