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OpenOffice 3.1 Released 327

Posted by CmdrTaco from the what-a-strange-topic-icon dept.
harmonise writes "OpenOffice 3.1 has been released. According to the release announcement, this update received 'The biggest single change (half a million lines of code!) and the most visible is the major revamp of OpenOffice.org on-screen graphics.' See the OpenOffice 3.1 New Features page for a full list of changes."
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OpenOffice 3.1 Released More

OpenOffice 3.1 Released

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  • antialiased! (Score:4, Funny)

    by spud603 ( 832173 ) on Thursday May 07, 2009 @12:11PM (#27862649)
    Finally with antialiasing !

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Chabo ( 880571 )

      Too bad they don't use antialiasing or any type of filtering for the thumbnails...

      http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.1/images/image11-big.png [openoffice.org]
      http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.1/images/image12-big.png [openoffice.org]

      • Openoffice's antialiasing only affects things rendered by openoffice. So a .png link to my browser doesn't really show anything.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Chabo ( 880571 )

          I know that they most likely didn't do any image processing or editing with OpenOffice, but if it was done in Gimp or Photoshop, setting the resizing operation to do bilinear or cubic filtering would make it easier on the eyes.

          I was being facetious though. :)

      • Haha... where do you even FIND a paint program that doesn't do at least bi-cubic when resizing? I hope they didn't use OpenOffice to resize the images, that's not exactly a glowing recommendation.

    • For fonts anyway. You want font hinting.

      Antialiasing is horribly slow and is one of the things which makes Gnome in particular seem so sluggish. Go on, turn it off and watch those menus fly.
       

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Mprx ( 82435 )
        Font hinting is distorting fonts to make them uglier. I'd rather use a higher DPI display or increase the font size. And if antialiasing is slow you're doing something horribly wrong, because RISC OS had usable text antialiasing back in 1989. The only cause of slowdown in GNOME menus is loading icons from disc, and most of the time they will be cached.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tepples ( 727027 )

          I'd rather use a higher DPI display

          Which isn't available in common subnotebook PCs, in part due to Microsoft's restrictions on what qualifies as an "ultra-low-cost PC" eligible for a Windows XP license. That's why subnotebook monitors are typically 1024x600 and not 1280x800 or so.

          or increase the font size.

          And increase the scrolling. Increase it too far in a document format that doesn't allow reflowing (e.g. PDF) and you have to scroll back and forth for each line of text.

        • I'm still amazed that RISC OS fonts looked so good back in the 1980s... that's 20 years ago.

          Word in Windows still gets its kerning wrong.

  • Will be include in F11 (Score:5, Informative)

    by levell ( 538346 ) * on Thursday May 07, 2009 @12:13PM (#27862695) Homepage
    Fedora 11, which is due to be released in about 3 weeks [fedoraproject.org], will have OO3.1 [mirrorservice.org]

  • What, half a million lines of code changed... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07, 2009 @12:15PM (#27862723)

    and still no Clippy the paperclip to help me write a letter?

  • .5 million lines of code (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zindorsky ( 710179 ) <zindorsky@gmail.com> on Thursday May 07, 2009 @12:16PM (#27862743)

    Having a lot of lines of code is not necessarily something to brag about. In fact, it's more likely to be an indicator of badness than goodness.

    If the product works great, people won't care how many lines of code it has. If it's buggy or sluggish or in other ways wonky, people might look at the code line count and point to that as the problem. ("It's bloated!" "It's so big no one can understand it or fix it!")

    • Re:.5 million lines of code (Score:4, Informative)

      by gurutc ( 613652 ) on Thursday May 07, 2009 @12:25PM (#27862925)
      So far the product (update) does seem to work great. Better than the previous version. I use the Calc program a lot, and it seems faster on some basic functions like loading files with forumulas.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tokerat ( 150341 )

      NetBSD advocates claiming you trashed their "7-million lines of new code [slashdot.org]" in 3...2...1...

    • Re:.5 million lines of code (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jhfry ( 829244 ) on Thursday May 07, 2009 @12:29PM (#27863015)

      Lots of lines of code CAN mean exactly what you say, bloat. However it appears that in this case many of the line changes were fixing issues and adding needed features.

      For example, they significantly reduced some bottlenecks in Calc... they made Base more like access in that you can actually create an "application"... and they added some very nice contextual help in places where non-power users will find it very handy, like when they are trying to use a Calc function and can't remember the order of its arguements.

      I would say that this is a decent point release for the OOorg team, evolutionary but not revolutionary. My only complaint is how much it is beginning to resemble MS Office; nice for adoption rates, bad for innovation.

  • Congratulations (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Abreu ( 173023 ) on Thursday May 07, 2009 @12:17PM (#27862773)

    Screw the naysayers, congratulations to everybody working in OpenOffice.org

  • Improved looks? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by B5_geek ( 638928 ) on Thursday May 07, 2009 @12:19PM (#27862813)

    I have heard for a long time how horrible OOo looked. Personally, I never understood what the problem was. The icons were clear and easy to dostinguosh between them, and the text-buttons were obvious.

    Compared to the newest version of MS Office, I'd say that any version of OOo wins hands down.

    • Re:Improved looks? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MrEricSir ( 398214 ) on Thursday May 07, 2009 @12:30PM (#27863025) Homepage

      Especially compared to MS Office 2007. It took me about 5 minutes just to figure out how to print something. I mean, it's an office program. There should either be a big PRINT button, or a File->Print menu.

      And ideally, a talking paperclip to help you stab your eyes out.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by FishWithAHammer ( 957772 )

        File->Print menu.

        There is. It's in the top-left corner.

        Or, you know. Hit Ctrl-P, like every version of office ever.

        • Re:Improved looks? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by mdielmann ( 514750 ) on Thursday May 07, 2009 @01:04PM (#27863739) Homepage Journal

          The point of icons and menus is so that you don't need to know cryptic keyboard commands. If the preferred solution to the updated icon system is to use the keyboard, they've failed. If the system is so changed that experienced Office users can't find the things they always did in the old version and there is no simple help for "how do I do x", they've failed. (It took me 30 minutes to just see the macro ribbon in Excel the first time. Now I just use Alt-F11 if it's not on the system I'm using.)
          Or to put it another way: The Ribbon system reminds me of the MacBook Wheel [theonion.com] - everything you want to do is just a few hundred clicks away.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by 644bd346996 ( 1012333 )

          It's not labeled as the File menu. In fact, it defies all pre-existing conventions for what a file menu is supposed to look like, and indeed, to the untrained eye, it looks just like a conceitedly large logo. (I'll admit, on Windows the logo in the top left corner does activate a menu, but the only functionality in it is from the window manager. And the logo is supposed to be 1/4 the size of the Office 2007 logo.) Microsoft essentially hid all of the most important functionality in a completely non-obvious

        • If this was obvious your fucking post wouldn't be modded "informative". The irony is thick.

    • The icons were clear and easy to dostinguosh between them..

      There's no 'I' in "dostenguosh"...

      -metric

    • "The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)

      What Plato forgot to mention is that the price good men pay for being involved in public affairs is to become evil men.

      It seems to me being on the right side is more important than being on the winning side, though others may disagree.

  • Word count (Score:5, Interesting)

    by simonwalton ( 843796 ) on Thursday May 07, 2009 @12:22PM (#27862855)
    Does it offer the ability to have an auto-updating word count in the status bar yet? It's absolutely essential to many people, particularly copywriters who are paid to hit a particular word count. It seems like such a trivial thing to implement and has been requested many times.

  • Anti-Aliasing! (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtomicDevice ( 926814 ) on Thursday May 07, 2009 @12:23PM (#27862867)
    "OpenOffice.org now uses a technique called anti-aliasing..."

    WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!!!!!!!

  • The new features are nice, but does it have anything that beats Microsoft's offerings?
    DRM & sharing for companies ?
    Integration with online services (like google office) for home users ?

    Obviously I mean other than running on Linux & mac natively, but does it beat gnumeric & abiword yet? I mean when im doing graphs OO (2.x) simply isn't as easy to use as gnumeric and is missing quite a few options.

  • go-oo.org (Score:3, Informative)

    by Randle_Revar ( 229304 ) <kelly.clowers@gmail.com> on Thursday May 07, 2009 @12:32PM (#27863071) Homepage Journal

    Personally, I am waiting for go-oo.org 3.1, as that is what goes into Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Gentoo and others.

  • Won't download to my mac... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07, 2009 @12:33PM (#27863091)

    I get some weird "download chooser" page, and if I select MacOSX from there, it won't download either. This is with Safari 4.

    I think somebody is trying to be too "smart".

  • Well, Duh! (Score:5, Funny)

    by camperdave ( 969942 ) on Thursday May 07, 2009 @12:33PM (#27863103) Journal
    ...the most visible is the major revamp of OpenOffice.org on-screen graphics.

    Well, Duh! I'll bet the least visible is the off screen graphics.

  • Most important question (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Thursday May 07, 2009 @12:48PM (#27863375) Journal
    When it encounters a ODF 1.1 document with formula arguments separated by commas created by the MsOffice2007 SP2, does it throw up a really really big nasty warning dialog that says, "MsOffice2007 is using ODF 1.1, please contact the vendor and urge them to start supporting ODF 1.2. We will be nice this one last time and hack around the commas and make them colons. But best if you could persuade the vendor of ODF1.1 docs to upgrade to ODF 1.2"?
  • i found an annoying bug, if i make a mistake and want to use the backspace key swriter does nothing, the delete key does nothing, the arrow keys do not navigate, even h j k l (vim style) does nothing, i have a USB keyboard on linux and usbhid is loaded, all other applications work fine with these keys, whats the deal Lucille? i am sure there is a solution somewhere.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thaig ( 415462 )

      Probably something specific to your machine and configuration which you don't say much about, BTW.

  • 500,000 changed lines of code (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cybereal ( 621599 ) on Thursday May 07, 2009 @01:19PM (#27863981) Homepage

    So someone decided to run a code tidying tool and dared to check in the results I guess?

  • Will this fix the printing issues in Calc? I was getting wild results before. Not even close to WYSIWYG.

  • Is this 500K lines of *new* code or *changed* code? If the latter, not bad, if the former, yuck!

  • OO still has one major bug (Score:4, Interesting)

    by belmolis ( 702863 ) <billposer@@@alum...mit...edu> on Thursday May 07, 2009 @02:44PM (#27865461) Homepage

    They still haven't fixed what I regard as the biggest bug in OO: the fact that file-opening and -saving dialogues default to the last directory it used rather than the current working directory when running on GNU/Linux. It is understandable that OO would use the MS Windows convention when running on MS Windows, but importing those conventions into Unix is a bad user-interface practice. There's a reason that Unix people move from directory to directory. For experienced Unix users who use different directories for different projects, the failure to track the current directory is very irritating.

    Even if they feel it necessary to provide the option of using the MS Windows conventions for people switching from MS Windows to Unix, it should be an option, not a requirement. And I doubt that this would be hard to do: determining the default directory for those dialogues is presumably only done in one or two places and should be very simple to code.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 )

      I 100% agree. I hate when prople import conventions from other operating systems. It's really annoying. Firefox does this too. Why, when selecting a helper application to open a link, do you have to navigate to /usr/local/bin/whatever? Why doesn't it check the path?

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