Monthly Archives: April 2012

Rare Opportunity at Making a Difference

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The LibreOffice Design team is asking for designs for three projects that have been accepted into Google Summer of Code (that means that they’re more than likely to be implemented): An ODF viewer for Android, a revamped Templates dialog, and a smarphone remote for Impress.

See the Design page for more information and to get involved.

The deadline for submitting a proposal is Saturday 5th, 16:00 GMT. Submit what you have — your proposal doesn’t have to be 100% complete.

Anyone is welcome to make a proposal. You don’t have to have any design skills whatsoever — a worded description will suffice, though mockups or paper sketches to go along with it would be much appreciated.

The final design will be based upon an analysis of all the submitted proposals.

Calligra Suite

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On April 11, Calligra Suite came out — forgive me for taking so long to write a post about it.

It turns out that I don’t hate the UI as much as I thought I would, though I still prefer that of both Google Docs (and, to a lesser degree, LibreOffice) by a considerable amount. The suite is still in its infancy, you can tell, but it also feels incredibly smooth, fluid — it’s built with new technology, you can tell.

What really excites me about Calligra is its modularity — it’s coded in such a way as to keep the UI as separate from the backend as possible, uses Flake as a library for objects, which means that objects should look and behave the same in every module of the suite, and these things make it much easier to develop new modules for the suite, to port the suite to other devices, and to create custom UIs for these devices.

Boudewijn Rempt describes it in depth in this video:

Too bad Calligra doesn’t have a design team… :)

P. S. I’ll be happy if you use/tweak/share/spread the calligram above — get the source code at this link. CreativeCommons Zero, as always, though be aware that the trademark law for Calligra still applies.