Executive Summary: GUADEC was fun. GNOME Office is now real. It would be nice to release a whole suite for GNOME 2.0. This will be lots of work. So start. :-) Much longer version: GUADEC 2, masterfully orcestrated by our Scandanvian compatriots, was a huge success for GNOME overall, and for GNOME Office in particular. First, lots of people were able to meet face to face for the first time, and lots of GNOME office developers were able to attend, including developers from AbiWord, Gnumeric, Guppi and Dia. Two talks were given on GNOME Office by Jody Goldberg of Gnumeric and Dom Lachowicz of AbiWord. The first was a BOF[1] where lots of good discussion happened between all the different GNOME office developers, and others in the community. We developed a very long list of things that we need to work on, some of which I will mention later. The second was a user-level presentation demonstrating some of the cool features of GNOME Office. Guppi's ability to spin pie charts in real time was spontatneously applauded. Much gratitude is due Dom and Jody for the excellent presentations. From these dicussions, we came up with a large number of points that need both discussion and work. Here are some of them. - Politics Sadly, politics has been a problem for GNOME Office almost since the beginning. However, since the only people at GUADEC interested in GNOME Office development were the folks working on the previously mentioned apps, we decided to damn the torpedoes and work with the excellent apps we have, and make them even better and more integrated. - Composition What is in GNOME Office? The following applications are clearly within the domain of an office suite as the market is currently defined (by Microsoft and its customers) and have expressed the desire to be part of GNOME Office: - Gnumeric [ spreadsheet ] - AbiWord [ word processor ] - Guppi [ charting and graphing ] - Dia [ diagramming ] GnuCash, I am told, has expressed the active desire _not_ to be considered part of GNOME Office. Other potential candidates for inclusion are [2] : - Sodipodi [ vector drawing ] - Evolution [ mail client ] - EOG [ image viewing ] - Toutdoux [ project management ] - Gimp [ drawing ] - Gfax [ faxing ] - GNOME-DB [ database connectivity ] - Galeon [ web browsing ] Of these, Gfax and Galeon equivalents are not usually included in other office suites. The major component we are missing is a presentation program, which I will discuss later. Fundamentally, the most important criteria for inclusion is if the developers want to be included, and to this end the developers of these programs should be contacted. Hopefully, components of GNOME office will also work well together, and integrate both technically and visually. - Goals We came out of GUADEC with a number of goals, some quite vague, and some quite specific. Here are a few: - Release GNOME Office 1.0 with GNOME 2.0. This means by Dec 31, 2001. - Integrate with the other GNOME Office applications better. This means using technologies like Bonobo. - Share more code. - Have a more similar look and feel. For example, have icons on the toolbars in the same order. Some of these goals, such as the last, are quite easy. Some, like Bonobo integration, are quite a lot of work. But all of them will improve GNOME Office significantly. - Release Plans The plan to release 1.0 by the end of the year is quite ambitous, since we have never released a previous version. However, it seems achiveable, and would greatly improve the visibility and the usability of GNOME Office. In order to accomplish this task, we need to do a number of things: - Decide what we want to do - Set a schedule - Hack like crazy - Release Here's the current status of the 4 apps I mentioned at the beginning. - AbiWord AbiWord is maturing rapidly, and will soon be heading into feature freeze for version 1.0. There is high probability that 1.0 will be released before GNOME 1.0 would be released. However, AbiWord 1.0 is likely not to be based on the GNOME 2 platform, neccessitating further work for integration before GNOME Office 1.0 - Gnumeric The Gnumeric maintainer, Jody Goldberg, has committed to releasing verison 1.0, with Bonobo support, before the end of the year. - Guppi Guppi already supports being embedded as a Bonobo control. It is at version 0.35.3. Further status unknown by me. Jon? - Dia Dia is at version 0.86. Further status unknown. For release plans, it would be nice to know in the resonanably near future the answer to the question "What is in GNOME Office?". However, this may not be possible. - Interoperation There are two major components to interoperation which will be dicussed here. - Bonobo Bonobo is the the component technology used by the GNOME platform. Currently, the only GNOME Office applications that take advantage of Bonobo are Guppi and Gnumeric, allowing Guppi charts and graphs to be embedded in Gnumeric spreadsheets. AbiWord plans to develop support for both embedding Bonobo objects and being used as such an object in the hopefully near future. - Code Sharing Currently, applications in GNOME Office share code in two different libraries. First, the GAL library contains a number of GTK widgets used by many GNOME apps. Second, libole2 is used by both Gnumeric and AbiWord to import MS documents. However, this code sharing could be extended, both to other applications in GNOME Office, and to other functions. For example, importing componound documents from other office suites will require common methods of handling the different parts of the document. - Collaboration Obviously, tasks of this magnitude will take work on everyone's part, and it will take everyone working together. This mailing list is for precisely that. Hopefully it can be a central communication method for all GNOME Office developers. Additionally, the IRC channel #gnome-office has been created on irc.gnome.org. This is certainly an exciting moment for GNOME Office. But there's lots of work to do, and we need to work together effectively to get it all done. Rememeber, hackers are lazy. :-) [1] Birds of a Feather session. [2] Taken from http://gnome.org/gnome-office/ sam th --- sam uchicago edu --- http://www.abisource.com/~sam/ OpenPGP Key: CABD33FC --- http://samth.dyndns.org/key DeCSS: http://samth.dyndns.org/decss
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