Hi all,
My name is Ingrid von der Mehden. Some may know me as Ingrid Halama
which is my former name. I am a developer on OpenOffice.org, alias iha.
I started to code on StarOffice in 1998 as an employee at Star Division.
This small German company was bought by Sun in 1999, which then was
bought by Oracle last year. I'm currently employed by Oracle and I'm a
member of the OASIS TC 'Open Document Format for Office Applications
(OpenDocument)'. I was not involved in the decision making process to
whom donate the OpenOffice.org code to. I am here on my own free will as
a private person. I do not speak on behalf of my employer nor on behalf
of any other entity.
My past work was to lead the Sun/Oracle internal development of the
chart component. I am one of the authors of the current implementation.
Some years ago we have rewritten that module basically completely new
reusing only little of the former code. This has become necessary to
allow for further feature development. It was an interesting adventure
to get the new component connected and work together with all the other
parts of the office (interfaces for load/save/filter, embedding via Ole
and new data connections to calc and writer).
Analyzing the chart related parts of ODF and working out proposals for
corrections and extensions has been also a significant part of my work.
Just to give an impression of the coding I have done in the recent
years: For OOo 3.4 Beta I've added date axes (one can display bars over
time having monthly intervals now). At the OOo Hackfest 2010 Regina and
me started making the size of the legend customizable and we got it also
integrated into OOo 3.4 Beta. Thanks to Regina for the helping hands and
eyes! For OOo 3.3 I coded on hierarchical axis labels and some other
layout and rendering stuff. I supported my mentee Weizhao from RedOffice
to implement the new chart types 'bubble' and 'filled net' for OOo 3.2
and helped Kohei from Novell to get in a switch for the behavior
regarding data from hidden cells. Further I did some work focusing on
usability (context menu stuff and a new element selector list box) where
Sophie lend me her helping eyes to get the things tested in time. OOo
3.1 has seen more flexible positioning of axes and axis labels and some
other work for right to left layout for an Arabic version. And so on and
on. :-)
In the future I would like to focus more on scientific chart users. I
think this is necessary to allow for a broader adoption of
OpenOffice.org within universities. Some essential features are still
missing here - for example X error bars. This feature has currently the
most votes (140) among the open chart features. Closely followed by
polynomial trend lines with 129 votes. Eric B, I am happy to see you
here! Very good to have a university expert available to ask :-) What do
you think? Would implementing these features benefit your students or
are there other things that are needed even more urgent?
What also might be interesting for the scientific users is a surface
chart type. My former mentee Weizhao from RedOffice has worked on this
already. We've had a very fruitful cooperation. Sadly Weizhao went out
to take another opportunity last year. I must admit that I have lost
track a bit of the surface chart topic as always something different has
been more urgent on my agenda recently. So I am sending my greetings to
the people from RedOffice! Maybe we can reconnect working on this topic
when things are running here?
Among the people from IBM I see Jian Fang Zhang. Was it you who
identified some serious chart bugs last year and send me the nice
patches to fix them? Thanks again for that! :-) By the way, I guess you
are located in China also? So I am sending greetings from Europe to Asia
again!
I am excited to see so many known and new names and colleagues from all
over the world. Looking forward to get to work on more cool stuff together!
Ingrid
