Office viewer for Maemo5 based on KOffice
Thursday, September 17th, 2009KOffice2 is still a fresh set of office tools. We released the 2.0, called platform release, just 3 months ago and work continues to make the suite more stable and to add the minimum set of features people should be able to expect.
All KOffice community members are continuing to do an awesome job with many bugs being closed and lots of love going into all the applications. This means that the 2.1 release will already be much closer to being ready for the big crowds.
We got a little help now too. Nokia has packaged KOffice for Maemo 5 environment with a new UI for Maemo 5!, This means that KOffice can run in the new Maemo device(N900) . Just to clarify, this is not a commercial product of Maemo but is a contribution by Nokia to Open Source. The developed application will be made available for download in a typical release-early release-often. Bugs will likely exist in this version.
This is exciting news as KOffice will be available to a huge audience and Nokia has been helping to fix bugs and make MS-Office document support more robust.
Nokia has created a document viewer for the Maemo 5 platform (Fremantle) based on KOffice and uses the KWord and KPresenter applications to load and display word processor and presentation documents. The application uses a custom user interface specifically designed to fit in with the Maemo 5 style.
Part of the projects goals is to help KOffice mature its loading and rendering of MSOffice documents.
It is important to point out that all contributions to KOffice have been made directly inside the KOffice subversion repository. The KOffice document viewer for Maemo 5 will be shown for the first time at Maemo Summit in Amsterdam between October the 9th and 11th. This release is a bit unfortunately timed as the official KOffice2.1 release will likely be one or two weeks later making the Fremantle office use the release candidate at first.
I think its very exciting to have the hard work of all the KOffice community members be rewarded by having the document reader be based on our hard work. I’m very thankful to be working on the project and I’m looking forward to continued cooperation between Nokia and the KOffice community.
