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The Document Foundation announces the MUFFIN, a new tasty user interface concept for LibreOffice

muffinBerlin, December 21, 2016 – The Document Foundation announces the MUFFIN, a new tasty user interface concept for LibreOffice, based on the joint efforts of the development and the design teams, supported by the marketing team. MUFFIN is an acronym for My User Friendly & Flexible INterface, and focuses on the three areas suggested by LibreOffice users during the development of the concept:

  1. My: LibreOffice users want a “personal” UI, with different options capable of adapting to the user’s personal habits, and not a single UI without options.

  2. User Friendly: of course, any UI should be as user friendly as possible, but LibreOffice users have clearly asked for a “modular” UI, where they can set their own level of user friendliness, and not a single UI without options.

  3. Flexible: the increasing number of LibreOffice users deploying the software on different hardware platforms (for instance, a desktop and a laptop), each one with different characteristics and screen size and resolution, have asked for a UI that can be tweaked to leverage the screen real estate, and not a single UI without options.

INterface: The MUFFIN concept is the combination of different UI elements, which are going to be available starting from LibreOffice 5.3 either as a standard or experimental feature: the Default UI (with toolbars), a Single Toolbar UI, the Sidebar with a Single Toolbar, and the new Notebookbar (experimental, and not recommended for production use). Each UI layout has been thought to serve a different cluster of LibreOffice users.

LibreOffice Writer with Standard Toolbar
LibreOffice Writer with Single Toolbar
LibreOffice Writer with Sidebar
LibreOffice Writer with Notebookbar

The rationale behind the MUFFIN is further explained in a marketing backgrounder [PDF] and in a specific blog post on TDF Design Blog.

LibreOffice has a new Extensions & Templates website

Berlin, December 14, 2016 – The Document Foundation announces the new Extensions & Templates website, which offers an improved user experience to both developers and end users: https://extensions.libreoffice.org. The resource is now based on the latest version of the Plone open source Content Management System, and has been both coordinated and developed by Andreas Mantke, deputy member of the board at The Document Foundation.

“Two of LibreOffice’s most distinctive characteristics are the possibility of adding features through extensions, and improving quality and consistency of documents thanks to templates”, says Andreas Mantke. “After six years, we decided to refresh the existing resource, to make it easier for developers to upload their files, and for end users to search and download them. I’d love to see an increasing number of contributors uploading extensions and templates”.

extensionsLibreOffice Extensions & Templates website offers 304 extensions, with 678 different releases, and 339 templates, with 376 releases. The three most popular extensions are: “Clipart gallery of danger signs”, “Copy only visible cells” and “LanguageTool”. The three most popular templates are: “Personal Budget Template”, “Simple FAX Template” and “LibreOffice Presentation Templates”. A large number of available resources have been contributed by end users.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org.

Third Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 5.3

bhs_5-3-0-beta2_largeLibreOffice 5.3 will be announced at the end of January 2017, with a large number of new features which are summarized on the release notes page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.3. In order to find, report and triage bugs, the QA team is organizing a third bug hunting session on Friday, December 9, and Saturday, December 10, 2016.

Tests will be performed on LibreOffice 5.3 Beta 2, which will be available on the pre-releases server (http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/pre-releases/) in time for the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), MacOS and Windows, and will run in parallel with the production version.

Mentors will be available on December 9 and December 10, 2016, from 8AM UTC to 10PM UTC. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of LibreOffice 5.3.0 Beta 2 will be available until mid December.

We would like to see the new font layout engine tested on MacOS in particular. Please drag all your MacOS friends and relatives into the testing effort! All details of the third bug hunting session are available on the specific wiki page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/BugHuntingSession/5.3.0Beta2.

During the dedicated sessions, we will concentrate all efforts to chase and reproduce the bugs, in order to confirm and file them in a more comprehensive way. Of course, the more comprehensive the bug report, the easier it will be for the developers to solve the bugs in time for the final release.

Second Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 5.3

noun_83830_ccLibreOffice 5.3 will be announced at the end of January 2017, with a large number of new features which are summarized on the release notes page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.3. In order to find, report and triage bugs, the QA team is organizing a second bug hunting session on Friday, November 25, 2016. Tests will be performed on the Beta version of LibreOffice 5.3, which will be available on the pre-releases server (http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/pre-releases/) a few days before the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), MacOS and Windows, and will run in parallel with the production version.

Mentors will be available on November 25, 2016, from 8AM UTC to 10PM UTC. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Beta release (LibreOffice 5.3.0 Beta1) will be available until mid December.

During the day there will be two dedicated sessions: the first to chase bugs on the main LibreOffice modules between 3PM UTC and 5PM UTC, and the second to test a set of the top 7 features between 5PM UTC and 7PM UTC. All details of the second bug hunting session are available on the specific wiki page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/BugHuntingSession/5.3.0Beta1.

During the dedicated sessions, we will concentrate all efforts to chase and reproduce the bugs, in order to confirm and file them in a more comprehensive way. Of course, the more comprehensive will be the bug report, the easier will be for the developers to solve the bugs in time for the final release.

FOSDEM Call for Papers: Open Document Editors DevRoom

fosdemFOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each year in Brussels (Belgium) at the ULB Campus Solbosch. In 2017, it will be held on Saturday, February 4, and Sunday, February 5.

As usual, the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be jointly organized by Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice, on Saturday, February 4, in room 4.401 in Building K (from 10:30AM to 6:30PM). The shared devroom gives every project in this area a chance to present ODF related developments and innovations.

We are now inviting proposals for talks about Open Document Editors or the ODF document format, on topics such as code, extensions, localization, QA, UX, tools and adoption related cases. This is a unique opportunity to show new ideas and developments to a wide technical audience.

Length of talks should be limited to a maximum of 30 minutes, as we would like to have questions after each presentation, and to fit as many presenters as possible in the schedule. Exceptions must be explicitly requested and justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you request.

All submissions have to be made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM17.

While filing your proposal, please provide the title of your talk, a short abstract (one or two paragraphs), some information about yourself (name, bio and photo, but please do remember that your profile might be already stored at Pentabarf).

To submit your talk, click on “Create Event”, then make sure to select the “Open Document Editors” devroom as the “Track”. Otherwise, your talk will not be even considered for any devroom at all.

If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please contact ode-devroom-manager@fosdem.org.

The deadline is Monday, December 5th, 2016. Accepted speakers will be notified by Sunday, December 11th, 2016. The DevRoom schedule will be published on the same day.

Recording Permission

The talks in the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too.

In the “Submission notes” field, please indicate that you agree that your presentation will be licensed under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 or CC-BY-4.0 license and that you agree to have your presentation recorded. For example: “If my speech is accepted for FOSDEM, I hereby agree to license all recordings, slides, and other associated materials under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License. Sincerely, Name”.

Announcement of LibreOffice 5.2.3

noun_21602_ccBerlin, November 3, 2016 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the availability of LibreOffice 5.2.3 “fresh”, the third minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family, representing the bleeding edge in term of features and as such targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users.

For all other users and especially for enterprise deployments, TDF suggests LibreOffice 5.1.6 “still”, with the backing of professional support by certified people (a list is available at: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

People interested in technical details about the release can access the change log here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.3/RC1 (fixed in RC1), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.3/RC2 (fixed in RC2), and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.3/RC3 (fixed in RC3).

Road to LibreOffice 5.3

With the availability of the LibreOffice 5.3 Alpha, the project has entered the road to LibreOffice 5.3, which will be announced at the end of January 2017. The next step in the process will be the release of LibreOffice 5.3 Beta around the end of November, and the announcement of the user interface concept.

Users can start learning about the new exciting features on LibreOffice 5.3 Release Notes page (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.3). The page will be updated for the next month, when the feature set will be frozen for the final quality assurance activity and the preparation of launch materials.

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.2.3 is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org.

Several companies sitting in TDF Advisory Board (http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) are providing either value added Long Term Supported versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and trainings, based on best practices distilled by The Document Foundation.

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