Thorsten's Weblog

This was a great week! After some days of congregation with the Novell team (hacking, planning, team building, late-night-bar-takeovers), the week was topped off by the public GoOOCon on Friday and Saturday with some very interesting talks. Nice to meet all the (also non-Novell) OOo hackers in person again – and had the most intense & exciting moments since quite a while when flying in mid-air about 10 meters above the ground:

Legend: climbing the 10-meter-pole, on which to stand & then jump across a largish gap to a swing. Last image: the surviving crop of GoOOers – we lost a few of them in action 😉

Big thanks to everyone who contributed, and especially to the local organizers Kendy, Petr & the SuSE Prague team!

If you’re an OOo hacker – don’t miss out on GoOOCon. Live streams available here!

After some folks asking about portability of OOo to mobile devices (and even good old Amiga), I decided that we need a canvas implementation that runs everywhere (or should I even say WORA?). Naturally, that entails a few compromises in rendering speed and quality, but OOo users are already pretty well adapted to ugly rendering & UI – or are they?

At any rate, I decided that probably the most ubiquituous output device technology is the the text terminal, spanning decades of IT hardware and orders of magnitude in computing power – portability at its best! Antialiasing on these kind of devices is a bit hard, but luckily OOo is not quite up to make use of it , anyways. Thusly, our office users don’t miss out on anything, quite the contrary – as I now expect a slew of ports to all those nifty mobile phones, pocket PCs etc…

So, based on the excellent libcaca, here are some first promising asciicanvas results: