Office viewer for Maemo5 based on KOffice
By Thomas Zander
KOffice2 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.
September 17th, 2009 at 19:06
Wow, great news. Makes me hopeful about possible (unofficial) builds of other KDE apps making it onto the maemo tablets. You know which one I favor
September 17th, 2009 at 19:20
great thing! congrats
September 17th, 2009 at 19:54
Nice! I’ve been considering to order the new N900. I guess I must order one because it even supports KOffice! Yay!
September 18th, 2009 at 19:37
[...] заявлению комманды разработчиков офисного пакета KOffice, для устройств под управлением ОС Maemo 5 /на данный [...]
September 18th, 2009 at 21:08
Great! Nice! Wow!
But can anyone answer:
- why the product is called “Office VIEWER”? Can I edit add create documents by it or VIEW only?
- could it be ported on Maemo4 (Diablo)?
- and how about tables?
September 18th, 2009 at 23:05
This sure is some awesome news. Definitely one more reason to try to get my hands on Nokia N900. BTW Is this also going to work for writing documents and not just reading only? Keep up the grat work and it is really nice to see KOffice 2 being so lean and flexible. I’m definitely looking foreward to reaplacing OOo on desktop with KOffice too.
September 19th, 2009 at 08:32
[...] 15th, KOffice 2.1 got its second Beta, and the big news is Nokia (N900) will use it as based application for office viewer on its Maemo 5. It is amazing, and from a user’s view i think now many of them will use KOffice not just a [...]
September 19th, 2009 at 11:57
Hi !
Amazing work, I make a french translation here :
http://manudwarf.wordpress.com/2009/09/19/lecteur-de-documents-pour-maemo-base-sur-koffice/
September 19th, 2009 at 12:17
@murabel this is view only, indeed. Editing on such a small device is challenging to begin with and this is a very early version so we thought it would be best to focus on viewing only.
Tables in text will be there, spreadsheet is something we could add in the future.
@Manudwarf awesome, thanks!
September 21st, 2009 at 21:01
[...] Por intermédio dos hermanos do Barrapunto chega a notícia, publicada no site do projeto KOffice, que a Nokia usou este aplicativo como a base do software de visualização de textos e apresentações para o Maemo 5 [...]
September 22nd, 2009 at 02:17
[...] Para conhecer mais detalhes visite este link. [...]
September 28th, 2009 at 13:25
How about translations? Will existing translations be included? I would think it’s essential, as Maemo is otherwise quite well localized and it’s something that you would expect from phones.
Will Nokia contribute to KOffice localization and to what extent?
Which KOffice branch is Nokia using? Where can one find the proper localization repository for user contributions? How can one test translations?
September 28th, 2009 at 15:02
@Marko
As you can see from the screenshot above, there are not a whole lot of strings to translate. None of the KOffice ones are used at all.
The couple of strings there are will be translated by the Maemo translation team as they are not shared with KDE either.
September 28th, 2009 at 17:09
[...] que Nokia colabora activamente con KOffice y están desarrollado en conjunto una versión específica para Maemo. Lo mejor de todo es que [...]