Hi Tony, Tony Walker wrote:
> I have grown quite tired of paper lab notebooks. They are hard to share, > expensive, not easily searched, awkward when incorporating electronic > data (acquired data, digital photos, etc.), etc. There are commercial > applications which replace paper notebooks, but they are expensive and, > frankly, I love open source. As a result, I have started writing what > will become an open source electronic lab notebook. As it stands right > now, my application uses oowriter as the editor, odt as the document > format, subversion to track changes (and enforce academic integrity), > and gnupg. As my application becomes more tightly integrated with > OpenOffice, I am increasingly thinking it should actually be part of the > OO suite: oolabnotes or something like that ;-). > > I have a lot of thoughts and questions, but I think the most important > initial questions are: > > 1) Is there ANY interest from the OO community for integrating lab > notebook functionality into OO? For me that sounds quite interesting. :-) As Bernd Eilers wrote, the simplest way (from a deployment POV) would be making it an extension. But without a more detailed information about the functionality and the architecture it's hard to judge whether this is possible or if we either needed some changes in OOo or even had to integrate your stuff completely into OOo. Implementing an extension gives you an update cycle independent from OOo and a much more stable interface. Of course you must get familiar with the UNO world of interfaces and services - but even implementing everything directly in the code code base wouldn't "save" you from that. > 2) If there is interest, how do I get started with the non-technical > aspects? That is, who needs to approve, etc. I would like to know more about your project. First to be able to give better answers and second because I'm curious. :-) Do you have something to look on? I mean concepts, code, ideas ... ? > 3) How would I start hammering out the overarching technical details? > For example, how does this application integrate with the others? Some time ago I thought about implementing a notes taking application - comparable to (and hopefully better as ;-)) Microsoft Office OneNote. This is an application that provides hierarchically organized notes. The first thing I would try to clarify is the possible file format: should it be one file for parts of the hierarchy or even the whole hierarchy? Or should it be one file per note sheet? Would be interesting to know yout thoughts about that. I developed a first idea for the integration of the program: make the notebook a container document that embeds all the note sheets, each one being an odt document. Editing one of them would be "activating" them in a document window. This could work fine even as an extension, my colleague Mikhail Voitenko some time ago provided a Java example how to use the Embedding API. This way the notebook application didn't need to take care of the integration and could focus on the notes organization. A drawback might be that Writer does allow much more to do with the text than you might consider useful for notes. But IMHO we could let the users decide what they want to use and what not. Best regards, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS Please don't reply to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
