Submitted by “The LibreOffice media team has passed along some new information about what was revealed at this week’s LibreOffice conference. At the Paris conference, experimental versions of LibreOffice for iOS, Android, and for web-browsers were revealed.”
“The LibreOffice media team has passed along some new information about what was revealed at this week’s LibreOffice conference. At the Paris conference, experimental versions of LibreOffice for iOS, Android, and for web-browsers were revealed.”
First StarDivision promised a web version of StarOffice.
Then Sun promised a web version of OpenOffice.
Now a promise of a web version of LibreOffice…..
So I take it you rank this up there with the phantom console and the year if the Linux desktop?
Looks to me like GTK is the one delivering it 😉
Then for all intents and purposes its worthless. If you need a bunch of plugins to make it work? Then it is NOT web based, anymore than some big flash/silverlight/.NET mess is web based. Its a client based app with SOME web elements.
If they truly want to make something web based then it should work with the major browsers, Chrome, Firefox, Opera (I’ll give a pass on IE, as you usually have to hack around to get it to work anywhere near a standard) and do so WITHOUT having a bunch of extra crud installed.
Because be honest folks: How many non Linux machines do you think are out there with GTK? Answer: Damned few. This also eliminates schools, libraries, offices, and anywhere where the user isn’t allowed to just install whatever they want. Kinda kills the WHOLE POINT of the web don’t it? After all if I have to install crud why not just use the native client?
bassbeast,
“Then for all intents and purposes its worthless. If you need a bunch of plugins to make it work? Then it is NOT web based, anymore than some big flash/silverlight/.NET mess is web based. Its a client based app with SOME web elements.”
Well, I understand your point. However HTML/js absolutely sucks at rasterization and highly interactive interfaces at the pixel level. Technically it can be done, but it absolutely crawls even while pegging the CPU to 100% on a modern computer.
The whole OO interface could be re-implemented on top of HTML object primitives, and would be much cooler in my opinion too. However that doesn’t seem to be the goal here, which was merely to project the desktop UI into a web browser.
I wouldn’t worry about that too much, it is just a first version.
They can optimize as you suggested in newer versions.
For now, they can make it work with pretty much any GTK application. That’s pretty cool.
You misunderstood. No plugins are needed.
The GTK-backend is a webserver and runs on a ‘server’ and you connect with the browser like any other website.
The GTK-backend generated a slightly more optimized VNC-like stream of pixels (as far as I could see).
HTML5 Canvas, WebSocket & JavaScript is used to display it and relay the mouse-over and click events back to the GTK-backend on the server.
So again, no plugins are needed. It works with IE10+ and pretty much all other modern desktop and mobile browsers in the near by future.
The only reason it doesn’t work in IE9+ and other last year browsers is because the used to be security problems with the new websocket protocol.
Edited 2011-10-16 20:30 UTC
It doesn´t require a plugin. The GTK application acts like a web server and renders the whole thing like a canvas element in the browser
Can you imagine the megabytes of JavaScript needed to make this work? Imagine the nightmare they will face to make a rich text document render properly even even if all the browsers are standard buzzword compliant? Imagine the war you will have between your computers global spell-check and libreoffice?
This is going to be a mess
There’s no JS involved (or very little). The “web” version is actually a remote version. The app runs on a server/workstation somewhere. You use the web page to connect to the remote system via a web socket. And then the output is shown in the browser.
This is just using the “web” interface in GTK+ 3.
There’s nothing “web” enabled about it. It’s really no different from running a remote X11 app.
Edit: yeah I shouldn’t post this late, especially after a long night of rooting my nook color multiple times.
Edited 2011-10-15 07:32 UTC
Just curious: What’s causing you to have to root it over and over? I’m asking because I have a rooted Nook Color on loan from a friend, who is trying to get me to buy it from him (he wants a Kindle Fire). I’m having one specific issue with the device: Google Docs consistently crashes on loading. I’m wondering if there is a fix for that.
Whether that issue is fixed or not, if this LibreOffice on Android thing pans out I think the Nook will meet or exceed all my needs regarding general mobile computing. The screen is 1024×600, same as my netbook, and LO works well on that device. The Nook at 800MHz and 512MB has already proven itself to be faster, more powerful and more efficient than the 1.6GHz netbook many times over.
The battery lasts forever, HD video playback is smooth as butter, e-reading is quite comfortable and even the alpha version of Minecraft puts the netbook to shame! A consistent 25-30 fps vs the netbook’s 5-10 fps, on a device with half the RAM and half the processor speed. Granted, it’s ARM so it’s hardly a direct comparison, but come on! That’s simply astounding.
Give me a full office suite that is ODF friendly and a bluetooth keyboard, and I may just ditch the netbook for good.
Edit: Removed repeated sentence fragment. I guess I’m up way too late as well…
Edited 2011-10-16 05:30 UTC
I actually just rooted it twice; the first time I must have done something (not sure what exactly) to hose the installation, as it became unbootable.
Luckily, the nook is easy to restore to stock releases.
Everything is going pretty smooth but the Market more or less stopped working for me (nothing I saw online helped really), but I can still sideload apks from the Evo. Sadly the dolphin browser doesn’t seem to work, but Opera is still pretty nice.
I’m glad to hear Minecraft works well on it; I haven’t tried it yet on the nook but was impressed by the graphics quality of dungeon defenders.
I’ve only messed with the google docs app briefly, but didn’t have any problems so far.
In the end I’ll probably suggest people get the Amazon Fire due to the availability of the Amazon appstore unless they know enough to root their nook color or at least understand some of the potential risks (however minor, such as some software not working). But I wanted something now and that was easily hackable; the Fire doesn’t have an SD reader, so It will be interesting to see how the hacking proceeds with it.
This is a big.
The other online office apps lack features and this field needs some extra competition.
A fully functional office suite on Android would be a great benefit especially for the millions of third world users as well.
And this Libreoffice development on the heel of this news.
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/10/14/1531252/openoffice-is…
Edited 2011-10-15 00:56 UTC
You left something off the end of your first sentence… flop.
Why do you feel it’s going to flop?
Because OOO is already a total and utter slow mess on desktops – let alone on phones and tablets through a goddamn browser.
Libreoffice runs noticeably faster on my Athlon XP 2400+ with 512MB RAM than OO.org ever did. I think they can make it work – and on Android, their use of Java isn’t really a penalty since the Dalvik VM is running all the time.
Have you tried recent releases of OO and LO ? There have been big improvements with OpenOffice 3 and later on my computer. Modern LibreOffice now shows up and loads most of my text documents in a matter of seconds, only big powerpoints can still take some time.
This is LibreOffice, not OOO.
LibreOffice is a couple of times faster than OOO. On the same machine, the order of speed would be:
LibreOffice > MS Office > OpenOffice.org
I can’t see this being of much use on phones, and I don’t think tablets will be big in the third world.
Haven’t you heard of the really cheap tablets coming out lately. Like those in India?
Tablet prices is dropping and some have add on keyboards.
Edited 2011-10-15 10:11 UTC
OpenOffice.Org is not dead at all … they are cleaning out the GPL’d code (which was actually not too much and is proving beneficial), and IBM has been hiring guys from the original team at SUN.
LibreOffice Coming to iOS, Android
Is this a joke? Because if it is, I ain’t laughing! This will be interesting! Let’s see, the iPhone 4 is equipped with 512MB RAM so logically a 512MB Android device should run this too which would be a mid-range device such as the Droid 3 (which unfortunately has only 512MB (Motorola I am quite disappointed!) RAM hence for calling it mid-range).
Edited 2011-10-15 08:52 UTC
I think that will be a huge task because LO being so big is not meant to be in a portable device, but even if they get it done … aren’t GPL’d applications having problems to get into the App Store? (I think VLC screwed it for everyone else).
Cydia would be an option but jailbreaking is not possible right now on newer iPads+iOS5.
Wish them the best though!
EDIT: Mis-read your post. Please ignore my previous header.
Starting over: Here’s the memory usage of scalc, w/ a fairly large multi-sheet excell spreadsheet running on ATOM netbook w/ Fedora 15/x86_64. *
$ top -n 1 -b -p $(pgrep firefox),$(pgrep scalc),$(pgrep soffice)
top – 16:36:10 up 27 days, 7:10, 2 users, load average: 0.37, 0.31, 0.23
Tasks: 3 total, 0 running, 3 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 2.5%us, 1.6%sy, 0.1%ni, 95.2%id, 0.5%wa, 0.1%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 1796812k total, 811132k used, 985680k free, 6776k buffers
Swap: 4194300k total, 14456k used, 4179844k free, 162824k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
10458 gilboa 20 0 1192m 248m 49m S 0.0 14.2 0:43.64 firefox
10227 gilboa 20 0 1065m 107m 64m S 0.0 6.1 0:10.73 scalc.bin
10215 gilboa 20 0 111m 1328 1128 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.04 soffice
$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1754 881 872 0 19 206
-/+ buffers/cache: 656 1098
Swap: 4095 14 4081
Now, even when using 64bit libraries and binaries 112MB *should* be suitable for any modern portable device (my SGS2 now has ~500MB of *free* space), but once optimized (E.g. using 32bit libraries instead of 64bit – something that will lower the resident and virtual memory size by a factor of ~2), it should be usable on any low-to-mid-end smartphone.
– Gilboa
* Asus 1201N, 2GB RAM, Fedora 15 x86_64, XFCE DE, Firefox 7, LibreOffice 3.3.3 – all 64bit.
(Edit: Copied the top output from the wrong machine)
Edited 2011-10-15 14:49 UTC
No way am I going to allow a single program on my phone to use 112 mb. It would be slow, and not allow me to task switch or anything else very well.
Having said that, I think there is a huge market for decent office software on phones but they need to make it optimized for the form factor while leaving most of the functionality.
Keep in mind that I’m running 64bit libreoffice running on a 64bit Linux – actual memory usage on a 32bit android smartphone should be considerably lower – well within the limits set by mobile browser (around 60mb)
– Gilboa
Duplicate please delete.
Edited 2011-10-15 18:38 UTC
112MB on a phone is way too much. I don’t really care if it’s open source or not as long as it works, it is functional and it is efficient.
Oh, for the love of God! How could I possibly make it clearer that the numbers came from a 64bit (in words, sixty four b*i*t*s) machine, which in most usage cases increase the memory consumption by a factor of 1.3x – 1.8x. (Simply compare the opcodes of i686 and amd64 and you’ll understand my point)
With this in mid, a possible 32bit android port should consume 60 – 80MB of ram depending on the compiler optimizations use and the code itself. Before you shout that even 80MB is far too much both the Google Android browser and Firefox 7/mobile consume ~60-70mb on my SGS2.
– Gilboa
Firefox did consume 80 mb on my phone, which is why I uninstalled it. It was way too much. Android Browser does not appear to consume nearly that much, in my experience. But Yeah 80 mb is the very upper limit, If its any higher than that it will be installed on a minuscule number of devices.
?
Most smartphone today ship w/ 384MB or above.
More than enough to run a 60-80MB full fledged (!!!) office suite.
… I doubt that LibreOffice should invest time on trying to shove a full office suite to a 5 year old Nokia N95… (But hey, feel free to disagree)
– Gilboa
“…late 2012 or early 2013…”
Are you certain mobile devices won’t advance in the next year and a half? Their timeframe strongly implies a next-generation target.
For what it’s worth, I already have full on OpenOffice on my Nokia N900 through Easy Debian chroot. It takes about 30-40 seconds to boot, but it’s there!
I also can run full Gimp,etc. This isn’t through a web browser either.
Android should be able to do the same thing with a Debian or Fedora chroot.
Apple has a tendency to ban any app they think even dares to have similar features as their own, with the exception of some big media companies. I can’t see them letting Libreoffice into their iOS app store, being as it is a direct competitor to iWork which is not only an Apple-made app, but a *paid* Apple-maid app. If I were the Libreoffice team, I would give iOS last priority unless they can secure an agreement, in writing, from Apple about this. Otherwise, they’ll just be putting in boatloads of time for nothing. The iOS jailbreak community is relatively tiny and, if Apple rejects LO, that’ll be the only way anyone can run it.
Then that conspiracy theory makes little or no sense at all give the alternative to iWork for iOS already exist on the platform; the only reason I can’t see LibreOffice appearing is if it relies on private API’s.
“Then that conspiracy theory makes little or no sense at all give the alternative to iWork for iOS already exist on the platform; the only reason I can’t see LibreOffice appearing is if it relies on private API’s.”
Really? There were reams of news articles about how applications were being banned by apple because they “duplicated functionality”. We all knew it was code for “competes against apple software”. I had always figured the news outlets got bored of reporting banned apps and the most significant developers stopped trying to develop competing apps once apple’s position was made clear. However if apple actually changed their policy since then, I would like to know.
Unless apple has openly changed their policy, then I’d agree with the OP, an iphone implementation of OO is at risk of being denied.
How about reading EVERY instance rather than lumping it all in the same basket – the issue was about replicating core functionality (applications that are part of the core operating system) that might confuse the end user into believing they’re using something but in reality using a third party tool. The rational they have is stupid and makes little sense (read through my past posts on what Apple should do when it comes to allowing one to load on applications without the need for the AppStore) but the reality is that it has nothing to do with ‘banning competing applications’ because there are a tonne of competing applications on the App Store already but we don’t see them getting banned.
If you dislike the iPhone then all power to you but you shouldn’t need to create fabrications simply to bolster what essentially is a matter of personal preference rather than something based on empirical and objective hard data.
Again, instead of posting complete and utter crap, how about searching the AppStore through the productivity section – dozens of applications that replicate what iWork does.
Edited 2011-10-16 10:10 UTC
kaiwai,
“If you dislike the iPhone then all power to you but you shouldn’t need to create fabrications simply to bolster what essentially is a matter of personal preference rather than something based on empirical and objective hard data.”
I’m just saying the OP has a valid point, many apps are at risk of being rejected by apple because they threaten apple’s own products. My opinion of the iphone is irrelavant, however I never said that I disliked the iphone.
“Again, instead of posting complete and utter crap, how about searching the AppStore through the productivity section – dozens of applications that replicate what iWork does.”
I don’t disagree with you, apple has been completely inconsistent in applying apple app store rules. Either apple’s app approval team are simply inconsistent, or they are strategically applying the rules differently to different apps. It doesn’t really matter which answer is correct, the OP’s point *still* stands; developing on the iphone is a risk unless they can get approval from apple first.
Edit: BTW I’m not trying to be confrontational, but it is true that apple had a history of banning apps for “duplicate functionality”. If you know that apple has changed their stance on duplicate functionality, I would like to read up on that.
Edited 2011-10-17 03:40 UTC
kaiwai,
Here is another theory as to why we might be hearing less about rejected applications (such as duplicate functionality). An apple NDA may prohibit developers from revealing which apps have been banned…
http://www.osnews.com/story/20321/Apple_Adds_NDA_to_App_Store_Rejec…