KOffice2 is still a fresh set of office tools. We released the 2.0, called platform release, just 3 months ago and work continues to make the suite more stable and to add the minimum set of features people should be able to expect.
All KOffice community members are continuing to do an awesome job with many bugs being closed and lots of love going into all the applications. This means that the 2.1 release will already be much closer to being ready for the big crowds.
We got a little help now too. Nokia has packaged KOffice for Maemo 5 environment with a new UI for Maemo 5!, This means that KOffice can run in the new Maemo device(N900) . Just to clarify, this is not a commercial product of Maemo but is a contribution by Nokia to Open Source. The developed application will be made available for download in a typical release-early release-often. Bugs will likely exist in this version.
This is exciting news as KOffice will be available to a huge audience and Nokia has been helping to fix bugs and make MS-Office document support more robust.
Nokia has created a document viewer for the Maemo 5 platform (Fremantle) based on KOffice and uses the KWord and KPresenter applications to load and display word processor and presentation documents. The application uses a custom user interface specifically designed to fit in with the Maemo 5 style.
Part of the projects goals is to help KOffice mature its loading and rendering of MSOffice documents.
It is important to point out that all contributions to KOffice have been made directly inside the KOffice subversion repository. The KOffice document viewer for Maemo 5 will be shown for the first time at Maemo Summit in Amsterdam between October the 9th and 11th. This release is a bit unfortunately timed as the official KOffice2.1 release will likely be one or two weeks later making the Fremantle office use the release candidate at first.
I think its very exciting to have the hard work of all the KOffice community members be rewarded by having the document reader be based on our hard work. I’m very thankful to be working on the project and I’m looking forward to continued cooperation between Nokia and the KOffice community.
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14 comments
Is the Office Viewer going to be installed by default with Fermantle or as a third party app?
If yes, then is Fermantle also going to bundle kdelibs and koffice-libs or has Office Viewer been stripped from these dependencies?
Other than that, it’s nice to hear that koffice has got some boost from you guys. Thank you.
Sounds cool. I hope that Nokia does not forget KDE collaboration when they work on Maemo 6. Basing Maemo on Qt is one thing, actually creating “plasma-smartphone” (or whatever) would be even cooler. Plasma applets look like the perfect candidate for mobile apps to me.
As this viewer is for Maemo 5, it’s probably not based on Plasma, right?
Anyone knows if maemo6 will be available for n900 ?
Thx
@kedadi the app will not be installed by default, its an early release. It will be separately downloadable as a 3rd party app.
I’m so relieved. Finally, a KOffice snapshot with decent fonts, rather than messy fonts and a subsequent explanation that it’s the font’s fault.
Seriously, this is great to see, more power to you!
Does this indicate that Maemo is moving toward Qt and away from GTK?
This is great news! I am very excited about KOffice and hope that it turns out to be a viable OOo competitor. So far it looks great!
Keep it up, while we are cheering for you!
Well done!
Is this pure Viewer or editing of documents will be also possible?
@Jason: Yes, Nokia has already announced, that the next Maemo release after Maemo 5/Freemantle will have a QT 4.6 based UI instead of a GTK based one.
Thomas, and the rest of the KOffice team, well done. This is great news, congratulations from a ex-contributor!
P.S. I *love* the work done on tables so far!
Excellent news that an ODF viewer will be available for Maemo 5 – bugger about the lack of spreadsheet support though
What about an ODF-Editor? A lightweight office application on Maemo? Viewing is great, but writing some lines and sending an ODF via email would be even better.
Why are so many software components or suites named after Australian cities lately (fremantle, libcanberra, libsydney, libwaggawagga)? I don’t see the same trend for any other country. Do developers throw a dart at a world map and choose the closest place-name?
Fremantle might qualify (on some maps) as having the largest area of any city on the map for which it is the closest city label. But this doesn’t explain why there is no archangelsk platform, no libCapeTown and no PuntaArenasOffice.
@xoddam: Maemo codenames are after the names of winds. The predecessor of Fremantle is Diablo, the successor is Harmattan. Both Diablo and Harmattan have nothing to do with Australia.
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