This list is always a great place to post up ideas that I have
to time/expertese to do myself, so here's another one :)
On ooqstart.sf.net can be found the gnome 1 openoffice quickstart
applet. This is something that I've been missing since I moved
to Gnome2. I contacted the author back in the day to see if he
was going to port it, but he'd moved on to other things.
The recent talk of Ximian's OpenOffice.org got me thinking about it
again. (If anyone decides to talk this up, make sure that Ximian haven't
already done something like it)
I just got the ooqstart code and had a look at it. As I remember it was
coded really well with the future in mind. The UI is totally sepporate
from the code that controls the quickstart. This was done because the
author planned on making a KDE applet as well.
I haven't got gnome1 installed so I couldn't build the applet itself,
but the command line test program works[1]. All that needs to be done is
to add a gnome2 applet frontend.
There are two things that can be done:
1. Make a standard gnome2 panel applet to link into the backend code.
I'm no expert but I think that this can't be very hard. All it needs to
do is link the backend code and have a context menu like the windows oo
quicklauncher and/or like the kde applet. It also needs to have a
properties applet to set the location of the oo binary. Looking at the
gnome1 applet code should be enough to see what needs to be done.
2. Instead of making an applet use the notification area. I haven't been
reading the notification area guidelines thread on desktop-devel, but
before doing it this way, we'd have to check with the guidelines (if
there are any). Doing it this way would mean that you could just extend
the command line tester to use the notification area. I think..
Also there is one tricky issue to keep in mind:
If two instances of the quickstart[2] are run it is impossible to close
openoffice. It just keeps respawning. This is unlikely to happen
normally. But what sometimes happens is that the user saves his session
and the oo qstart command[2] is saved with it. Then when the user logs
in again, that command is run both by gnome-session and by the applet on
the panel and openoffice becomes unclosable.
I worked on some workarounds for this back in the day. I also talked to
the guy behind the kde quickstart applet and he had some ideas. There is
some code in the gnome1 applet part of ooqstart that tries to stop the
openoffice quickstart program from being added to the session. I'm not
sure how well it works.
I think the best solution would be to modify the backend code to make
check if there is already an instance of openoffice running and if there
is to use that.
Anyway, if someone does write the gnome2 applet code this is something
that would need to be given a lot of testing. I'd be willing and able to
get involved at that stage(as well as at any other stage, just not so
good a coding really).
This has been a pretty long and complicated e-mail, but for someone who
wants to learn and wants something to code. There really isn't that much
involved.
Later
Mark
[1] My initial load of openoffice is reduced from 10 seconds to five,
and after that it loads instantly :) Feels reallll goood that way. but
you need to have a good bit of ram for it to work that well.
[2] /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice.bin -plugin -quickstart on RH8
The backend code is really simple because (limited) quickstart
functionality is already build in to openoffice. All it does is make
sure that the openoffice quickstart element is kept in memory.
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