OpenOffice.org
Development digest
2nd February 2004

by C.P. Hennessy

Spanish translation available thanks to Alexandro Colorado.

It seems thet the MyDoom/Novarg virus affected the mailing lists at OpenOffice.org as most lists grew to a crawl and some even shut for business completely.
Besides this normal OpenOffice.org development proceeded.

Biweekly developers build M22

The developers build m22 has been released and includes changes for table cells/rows which can now continue over a page boundary, general UNO API for URI handling, more compatability fixes, VCL cleanups, and many other bug fixes. Also included is the work around for the comma/dot usage on the keypad for spreadsheet users.

Plugins for VCL

The document here describes the VCL plugin architecture and which plugins are available at this time.

Native Language News

Afrikaans, Zulu and Sipedi announcements

Craig Adams wrote to tell us that the Afrikaans dictionary and the beta Zulu translation of OOo 1.1.0 were available adn that the the Northern Sotho (Sipedi) and Afrikaans beta translations are now available. For more info you can refer to openoffice.org.za or www.translate.org.za.

Arabic & Hebrew Native-Lang Projects

Two more native-lang projects were announced.

The Arabic Project is led by Mr Khayat and backed by the Arabeyes free-software community, an important player and supporter of free software and OpenOffice.org in the Arabic world. The Hebrew project has been created by Tkos, an Israeli company who is also in charge of localizing OpenOffice.org and StarOffice but who managed to set up a real and lively community of users, developpers and marketers.

These two projects show the growing influence of OpenOffice.org in the Middle-East and we are delighted that such prestigious cultures and people have adopted OpenOffice.org as their free and open productivity suite .

In Other Development News

Mailing list problems

OpenOffice.org mailing lists were severelly affected by the MyDoom virus as the mail server was very busy routing the messages to the poor receipients. Work from the COllabNet camp hints at messages in the millions being handled. This is another reason why this digest is a bit one the "light" side.
Some of the impressive statistics available up to Feburary 2nd :

API@OOo NEWSLETTER: Janurary/2004

This months newsletter covers :

OpenOffice.org Perl Library

The OpenOffice.org Perl Library(ooolib) can be used to create simple OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheet and Writer text documents.

Mistaken attribution of the PyUNO OOo XML SAX Parser

I must applologise to Danny Brewer as last week I mistakenly attributed the PyUNO code he wrote to someone else. Danny has actually written quite a number of PyUNO articles on OOoForum.

OpenOffice.org 1.1 for OS/2 goes beta

Innotek announced the Beta port of OO 1.1 for OS/2 and eCs is now available at the innotek download site.

This weeks Issuezilla summary

Many bugs have been worked on and resolved (as of Monday Feb 02 2004 ):

 No this week  Change from last week
Issues which have the status UNCONFIRMED 390
-41
Issues which have the status NEW 952
+4
Issues which have the status STARTED 1035
+45
Issues which have the status FIXED 7724
+53
(a more detailed set of statistics is available here)

Some of the more interesting CVS developments over the last week include:

week 5 (2004):