I guess you already noticed this? Slashdot Newsticker wrote: > http://slashdot.org/articles/01/10/04/1817237.shtml > > OpenOffice 6.0 Released > > *Posted by timothy[1] on Thursday October 04, @02:56PM* > > *from the another-promising-one dept.* > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] was there last night when "Max Lanfranconi of the > OpenOffice project[3] spoke to the Silicon Valley Linux User > Group[4] on Wednesday morning's release 6.0 of the LGPL'd office > suite. When the project was opened two years ago, it was missing > online help, spell-checking, and printing which had been based on > proprietary commercial libraries. With release 6 the open source > community has replaced these missing features." Read on for some > more information on the new release, courtesy of Kevin. > > "Release 6 also gets rid of the old Star Office desktop of version > 5 which was generally disliked for its annoying tendency to cover > up all of the other windows you were working with and make it > difficult to interact with your X Window Manager." > > "The application suite has programable APIs for each of the > applications, exposed through a custom object request broker named > UNO. In an impressive demonstration, Max showed live update of a > spreadsheet with real-time stock data, all under the control of a > small Java application. Changed data were reflected throughout the > spreadsheet table with each update as the sheet recalculated each > cell based on the new input." > > "Max freely admits that there are still weaknesses in the code. He > pointed to the ten year lifespan of the mostly C++ code base, and > hopes to see the code improved with the use of more modern C++ > features. In browsing through the source tree I don't find that > the code is in nearly as bad shape as Max portrayed it. Admittedly > I've only seen a tiny fraction of the code (at 3.7 million lines, > OpenOffice is by far the largest open source project in the > world), but my random sampling showed very good coding practises, > like preprocessor guards around each header include to reduce > compile time due to reopening headers that have already been > processed. Even with these measures in place however, the full > system takes upwards of 15 hours and 1.5GB of disk to build on > currently available hardware." > > "System load time for the office suite has been significantly > reduced (about 20s on Max's 500MHz laptop with 128MB memory) by > removing several libraries from the link process and instead > loading them on demand. Over the next year or more Max hopes to > see more modularization of the code base with the eventual goal of > seperating the monolithic program into seperate applications > linked together through an object request broker." > > "Q&A went on until we got kicked out of our room, so there is a > lot more that is new about OpenOffice than I've described here. If > you are interested you can pick up a copy at OpenOffice.org[5], or > at one of its mirrors[6] around the world." > > Links: > 1. http://www.monkey.org/~timothy/ > 2. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > 3. http://www.openoffice.org/ > 4. http://www.svlug.org/ > 5. http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/build_638c/build638c.html > 6. http://www.openoffice.org/mirrors.html
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