8. What changes have you made to OpenOffice.org when compared to its vanilla version?
Nat Friedman: We've done about six months of heavy development on OOo, all focused
on improving consistency across the desktop and compatibility with
Microsoft documents.
We don't _want_ to have any delta against the upstream OOo tree, so we're going to be working to get all of those changes upstream now that this release is done.
Here's a dump of some of the key new features in our OOo:
- ~1,000 new alpha-blended icons that are aesthetically consistent with the rest of the desktop. We use large icon mode by default. We also have some other new art in some of the wizards and of course the splash (which no longer makes your desktop unusable while each application starts up).That's a quick summary; we have nearly 100 patches against OOo. Check out the .src.rpm for the full list :-).- Shares the Gtk theme elements ("theme chameleoning"). Uses fontconfig, AA fonts everywhere in the UI now.
- Mapping of MSFT document fonts to Agfa fonts (which XD2 includes).
Also, our artists drew a whole new font just to handle the bullet mappings (which aren't fully covered by Agfa's fonts).
- GNOME-VFS integration so you can open any files the VFS can get to. This includes files on SMB and NFS shares. We even handle the authentication for these shares (Michael Meeks redid the authentication layer in OOo), so you get prompted if the share is password protected.
- Nice CUPS printing integration so you get the same printer list in OOo you get everywhere else in the desktop.
- Support for the recent files spec so that System->Recent Files reflects the documents you've opened in OOo.
- Uses MSFT file formats by default, reflecting the reality of most of the documents you will receive. No longer tells you you're about to lose all your data when you save in an MSFT format.
- Removed the non-redistributable GPC library, replaced it with libart so that we can ship OOo with better support for importing PowerPoint presentations.
- Integrates nicely with Galeon and Evolution. OOo HEAD actually does Evolution addresbook mailmerge, which we're looking forward to.
- Includes a number of foreign-language dictionaries.
- We've also done some performance tweaks and fixed a number of customer-reported bugs. Our turnaround time on fixes for document importing issues is actually averaging 24-48 hours, which is pretty remarkable.
9. Do you have any plans to move to the Gecko HTML rendering engine for Evolution or are you going to continue to improve and maintain gtkhtml?
Nat Friedman: When we started developing Evolution, Gecko was incomplete and way too big, and especially ill-suited for editing HTML, which we needed for the mail composer. That is why we needed to write our own HTML widget.
Gecko has matured a lot since then, but of course so has GtkHTML (it uses Pango now, and can edit tables and so on). I think there is still a need for a lightweight HTML widget that does all the things you need for mail, but we'd certainly accept patches to use Gecko in Evolution. It would be nice not to have to maintain an HTML widget, but right now that doesn't seem plausible. Maybe someday.
10. Ximian is gaining notoriety in the messaging & collaboration enterprise Unix market with its products, but there are more products that could fill some gaps; do you have any plans to deliver a large collaboration product, similar to Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, a Conferencing Server, or a more "industrial" version of Gaim or some other IM system?
Nat Friedman: No, not right now. There's a lot still to do in Evolution :-).
- "Nat Friedman, Part 1"
- "Nat Friedman, Part 2"
- "Nat Friedman, Part 3"
- "Nat Friedman, Part 4"
