We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog from the conference in Tirana – in the meantime, check out some pics of the city, the conference venue, the pre-meeting dinner, and the community meeting…
Author: Mike Saunders
LibreOffice at droidcon Vienna
LibreOffice is available for Android smartphones and tablets – albeit as a “Viewer” application, for checking documents on the go. There is an experimental editing mode, but it still needs more work, and we’d love to have more help and feedback to improve it!
So to spread the word amongst potential contributors, Christian “Cloph” Lohmaier (LibreOffice’s release engineer) and Mike Saunders attended droidcon Vienna on 21st and 22nd of September.
Organised by AndroidHeads and the Google Developer Group Vienna, droidcon is made up of 20 sessions on various topics. On the first day, Cloph gave a talk titled “Struggles with a large native app, LibreOffice’s attempts at Android”, describing the first stages of development of the LibreOffice Viewer, challenges faced along the way, and the next steps to take. Full slides from the talk are here.
At the end of the talk, there were some questions from the audience about the build process and testing. As Cloph explained, the Viewer app doesn’t have many user interface elements to test, so the main issues are related to the “lifecycle” – ie when users open and close the app, rotate their devices, and so forth. And regarding the build system, Cloph noted that it’s much better today, compared to the early days of the app.
Meanwhile, one of the recurring topics at the conference was Kotlin, a “statically typed programming language for modern multiplatform applications” that runs on the Java VM. Kotlin is growing in popularity, so if you’re interested in the language and the possibility of converting the LibreOffice Android apps (including the Impress Remote), give us a hand! Our wiki has information on building the apps, and you can also talk to our developer community on IRC and mailing lists too.
Finally, after the first day of droidcon, there was an evening party with more opportunity to share ideas and meet people. So thanks to the organisers, and now we move on to the LibreOffice Conference 2018 in Tirana, which is just a few days away…!
Four ways you can make LibreOffice even better
Every new major release of LibreOffice includes new features and updates – but they don’t happen by magic! They’re created by a worldwide community, and you too can join in and help to improve the software. See the graphic below for some ideas – and then visit our site to learn more!
LibreOffice Conference 2018 – over 100 attendees already registered!
Yes, the LibreOffice Conference takes place later this month in Tirana, Albania – and over 100 people have already registered! It’s going to be a great event, with talks about new technologies in LibreOffice, community discussions, plans for the future of the project… And fun evening events as well!
Come join us – if you haven’t registered yet, you can still do so here. The website has additional information about the venue, accommodation and transport.
Oh, and if you’ve never been to a LibreOffice Conference before, we’re a friendly bunch – here we are at the 2016 conference in Brno, for instance:
See you there!
Community Member Monday: Battsengel Ichinnorov
It’s time for another LibreOffice contributor interview! Today we speak to Battsengel Ichinnorov, a new TDF member, who helps to localise LibreOffice for Mongolian users…
Where do you live, and are you active on any social media?
I live in Munich, Germany, and I follow The Document Foundation and LibreOffice on Telegram. You can find some of my work on GitHub.
In which areas of the LibreOffice project are you active?
I am translating the wiki and LibreOffice itself into Mongolian (for instance, I made the keyboard layout for Mongolian for Windows: German and English. After this, I will create them for Linux.)
How did you get involved with LibreOffice?
A friend of mine, Dennis Roczeck is a helper and admin on the wiki.
What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like? What else do you plan to work on?
Everybody has a goal to reach, and mine is a free office for Mongolian people! Firstly I want to build a team and finish the user interface translation, then maybe get involved in development and/or ops and/or devops 🙂
What tools do you use for your work?
So I know many tools, but the best is for me for programming, to save time and be productive, is IntelliJ IDEA. Other tools which I use: Atom, Notepad++, ConEmu for WSL in Windows.
What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?
Meet my friends and go hiking in the Alps, and study programming languages or test new technologies. At the moment I’m looking at Docker, Kubernetes and Terraform in the cloud.
Thanks to Battsengel for all his contributions! If you’re reading this and also want to join our friendly community, and help to make LibreOffice even better, we’ve made a page just for you. There are lots of ways to get involved – we look forward to meeting you!
LibreOffice monthly recap: August 2018
August was a big month for our project, with the release of a brand new version of LibreOffice! And surrounding the release, there was lots of activity in our development, documentation, design, QA and translation communities…
- LibreOffice 6.1 was announced early in the month, with many new features and updates including new icon themes, improved EPUB support, a revamped image handling engine, and the ability to sort anchored images in Calc. Check out the announcement for more details, and this video for a demonstration of the new features:
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- The day after the release, we organised an “Ask us Anything” session on Reddit. TDF team and board members, along with community participants, answered questions, responded to ideas, and shared feedback about the new release. The Reddit post has over 33,000 views at the time of writing, so a big thanks to everyone who took part!
- One week later, we looked at some statistics relating to the new version. LibreOffice 6.1 had been downloaded 373,758 times (for comparison, it’s 649,158 now). We had 274,916 visits to our website, 192,232 visits to our blog, and 21,347 impressions of the announcement tweet.
- Meanwhile, the LibreOffice 6.0 branch continues to be maintained, and is recommended for enterprise deployments. Our hard-working documentation community released the LibreOffice 6.0 Writer Guide, with a general introduction to Writer followed by chapters about specific features. It’s available in ODT and PDF formats, and also in hard-copy (printed). If you find the documentation useful, you can give the community a hand!
- Also in August, we showcased the results of the tender to implement of a HSQLDB binary format import in LibreOffice. Tenders are aimed at improving LibreOffice in several strategic areas, and documenting the approach and work carried out, to foster sharing of knowledge and inclusion of the wider volunteer community. Collabora was assigned this specific tender, and our blog post links to technical explanations from developer Tamás Bunth.
- In the middle of the month, we chatted to Sam Tuke, a long-time Free Software supporter and campaigner, who helps the LibreOffice project in marketing and QA (quality assurance). We plan to post regular “Community Member Monday” interviews on this blog, so stay tuned!
- Finally, our Taiwanese community reported back from the “LibreOffice Asia Meetup”, an event held in Taipei. The attendees included LibreOffice and other Free Software community members from Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Taiwan. Franklin Weng, TDF board member and one of the organisers, said: “Besides sharing our experiences of adopting ODF and using LibreOffice, we can also learn from many different countries and help each other”.
