You are currently browsing the archives for the Open Source category.
Christoph Noack writes about user experience prototyping strategies, based on a presentation he attended at the CHI conference a few weeks ago. He covers the importance, in wireframing, of capturing essential elements while avoiding distracting detail that is not relevant to the design stage.
Current efforts to improve the OpenOffice.org StartCenter are in this process now. (My concept for the Dashboard is described here.)
WorldLabel.com’s blog describes a new OpenOffice.org Extension in Dmitri Popov’s post “Turbocharge OpenOffice.org Writer with AuthorSupportTool.”
The AuthorSupportTool (AST) extension… dramatically enhances the word processor’s functionality, turning it into a powerful tool for working on research papers and complex documents.
AST provides a number of features, including a Template Wizard with templates for major types of academic documents, a tool to manage bibliographic references, and “focal points” and “work progress” indicators.
These latter two are unique tools. Popov explains, “You can think of the focal points editor as a graphical non-hierarchical outliner which you can use to manage the document structure as a flowchart. The clever part here is that once the flowchart is ready, you can convert it into the traditional document structure where each node (or focal point in AST’s terminology) becomes a document heading.”
The Work Progress function “provides a visual timeline as well as essential info about the current document, including word and page count, number of illustrations and tables, and so on. Here you can also specify the duration of the project and set milestones.”
In recent discussions of OpenOffice.org marketshare, two key facts stand out. The first is that OOo’s marketshare is much higher than most observers expected, and the second is that Microsoft Office’s marketshare is much lower than common knowledge has long dictated.
The current discussion of market share was first touched off by Webmasterpro.de, which published “International OpenOffice Market Shares” about a week ago. In this article, author Thomas Hümmer was able to determine approximate installed base / market share of OpenOffice.org and other competing office suites and broke down the numbers by country. Leading countries include Poland and the Czech Republic at 22%, Germany at 21%, France at 19% and Italy, Spain and Denmark close behind.
Hümmer points out some contributing factors to these high numbers, including the fact that many of their public administrations have adopted ODF or OpenOffice.org for their own use. He also notes the correlation between high adoption of OOo and Firefox, which itself has nearly 50% market share in both Poland and Germany, an increase from several years ago, when Firefox was in the same range as OOo is today. OOo’s continued growth thus seems very likely to follow a similar trajectory.
And what of the low marketshare numbers posted by MS Office? For years, common knowledge has been that “everyone has Microsoft Office” installed, which, to give it a number, one might translate to 95%. However, Webmasterpro found no country with greater than 88% penetration for MSO, while most were much lower (the USA only posted 75% installation of MSO, in fact). Germany and Poland were even lower, at 72% and 68%, respectively.
More discussion of this interesting new information can be found at Computerworld UK, in “Has the Irresistible Rise of OpenOffice.org Begun?” by Glyn Moody, at OStatic’s “OpenOffice.org by the Numbers” by Joe Brockmeier, and in many other recent articles.
ODF support in more applications is always a good thing. It provides further utility to users, expands and strengthens the software ecosystem, and demonstrates the superiority of open data formats.
Along these lines, Bob Sutor asks, “What would ODF support for WordPress look like?”
“Thinking of WordPress as a content management system, importing an ODF file means taking a word processing, presentation, or spreadsheet document and putting into a form that can be saved and displayed by WordPress, either in a blog post or a standalone page. For simple text, this would mean translating to HTML. Doing a bit more work, it could mean using HTML and CSS for formatting. Getting even fancier, it could incorporate extra JavaScript or PHP code to handle spreadsheets in a live manner.”
He points out a Drupal module serving a similar purpose, and collects some good comments from Rob Weir and Walt Hucks helping to further develop the idea.
Danish OpenOffice.org project members pointed out the Danish Parliament’s decision this week to require government data be stored in open formats. They developed a list which explicitly included ODF and excluded MSOOXML.
The original article can be found at: ODF Wins the Document Format War (via Google Translate).
It’s also covered in English at The Register (Danes Ditch Microsoft, Take ODF Road – At Last) and OSOR.EU (DK: Danish state administrations to use ODF).
The Register: “Parliamentary parties decided – after four years of deliberation – to use the Open Document Format in all Danish state office documents.”
OSOR.EU points out:
“The open standard ODF is recognised by many European member states. Next to Denmark it is also a national standard for public administrations in Belgium, Germany, France, Lithuania, Sweden and the Netherlands. ODF is recommended by Norway and it is one of the document standards at NATO.
“ODF is a document standard supported by many office applications, including most open source office software packages. The list of software companies supporting ODF include Sun Microsystems with its StarOffice, Google with Google Docs, IBM with Lotus Domino and Workplace. Microsoft supports ODF in the second edition of its 2007 version of its Office suite. Earlier versions require a plugin made by Sun Microsystems. ODF support is also included in the office suite Hangul, used by many of Korea’s public administrations and the office suite Itchitaro, which is popular in Japan. Open source applications that can handle ODF include OpenOffice, K-Office, Abiword, Gnumeric, Scribus and TextEdit.”
Wishler is our new social wishlist sharing service. Using a bookmarklet, Wishler users can add items from any online store to their wishlists, and share them with friends. Our current site is a beta and we plan to continue adding features and improving the interface with community feedback, so please let me know what you think of the site: www.wishler.com
Thanks.
According to recent reports, the usage share of Firefox, at 45.6%, has surpassed IE (at 44.4%) for the first time, in Germany. “Other” browsers have also reached a record high of 9.5%. See Heise Online for the full story.
Meanwhile, ODF has been selected by Slovakia as its government’s standard data format. Boycott Novell reports this and other news in ODF Wins in Slovakia, Maybe More Countries.
My team recently created a demonstration site to promote Six Apart’s new Motion platform and provide a space for OpenOffice.org community members and fans to share with each other at Share OpenOffice.org.
The site is ideal to quickly post questions, links, and images and to embed videos and spark conversations within the community.
Still to come is custom design work and an ongoing promotional campaign to introduce the site to the broader community of OpenOffice.org and open source fans.
Add to the catalog of European governments and agencies adopting OpenOffice.org two more:
eGov Monitor announces that Germany’s city of Munster has chosen to standardize on OpenOffice for its school IT in German City Münster Launches Pilot Project For its Schools To Adopt Open Source Software:
At the moment, teachers are trying out OpenOffice in two schools. The suite will be made available to all schools in November 2009. “We plan to make OpenOffice the default office application for schools”, said Citeq’s spokesperson Stefan Schoenfelder.
The second note comes from OpenOffice.org community member Leif Lodahl of the Danish localization project, who writes:
We are experiencing a very important breakthrough in
the municipalities right now.City of Gribskov has been using OpenOffice for a few years.
City of Tønder has been using OpenOffice in schools for about a year.
City of Lyngby-Taarbæk has decided to use OpenOffice in schools.
According to the local newspaper this is only the first step towards a
compete change from MS to OpenOffice in the administration as well…Even the Mayor is happy
Another city close to Copenhagen is about to implement a new version of a
Case- and Document Handling System, that integrates OpenOffice into it. From
then, more than 90% of new documents will be produced with OpenOffice.
Expected to be implemented beginning of November this year. (I will talk
about this case at OOoCon this year).
Thanks for the update, Leif!
Right about now, OpenOffice.org is celebrating its ninth birthday. (Catch www.openoffice.org for the birthday cake logo before it’s gone!)
The project and the software have achieved much in nine years. Highlights to date include helping launch the OpenDocument Format, creating a complex application that supports all the main computer platforms, distributing hundreds of millions of copies, building a userbase of possibly one hundred million users, and saving governments, businesses, students and home users hundreds of millions of dollars collectively in software licensing fees.
Here’s to the next nine!