Today we release LibreOffice 4.4.0, packed with a load of new features for people to enjoy - you can read and enjoy all the great news about the user visible features from so many great hackers, but there are, as always, many contributors whose work is primarily behind the scenes in places that are not so easy to see. That work is, of course, still vitally important to the project. It can be hard to extract those from the over eleven thousand commits since LibreOffice 4.3 was branched, so let me expand:

Complete User Interface Dialog / Layout

The UI migration to a much improved, Glade compatible XML representation of VCL dialogs, complete with automatic layout is now almost complete (after thinking we'd done them all - Caolan discovered a lot of docking windows that need further work but these are now also migrated, all but two). Also a lot of work was put into cleaning up and tweaking the look / arrangement of dialogs. Many thanks to Caolán McNamara (Red Hat) - for his incredible work & leadership here, and to Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, Palenik Mihály (GSoC 2014), Olivier Hallot (EDX), Szymon Kłos (GSoc 2014), Rachit Gupta (GSoC 2014), Tor Lillqvist (Collabora), Jan Holesovsky (Collabora), Maxim Monastirsky, Efe Gürkan YALAMAN, Yousuf Philips and many others. Thanks also to our translators who hopefully will have much less string churn to suffer now. As a side-note the resource-compiler in rsc/ has gone on a nice diet.

Initial OpenGL rendering backend

The switch to move VCL to use OpenGL for rendering is one of those things that ideally should be entirely under-the-hood, but ends up having small but important visual impact. All the work here was done by Collabora engineers, with a beefy re-factor and the initial OpenGLContext management by Markus Mohrhard, much of the rendering implemented by Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne with anti-aliasing, and image scaling work from Lubos Lunak, various Windows fixes and porting work from Jan Holesovsky and some bits from Chris Sherlock. During the work we also implemented a half-way decent and increasingly complete VCL demo application exercising rendering. A rational for the work with some pictures is available.

By moving to a pure OpenGL rendering model, we can accelerate those operations that badly need to taking advantage of the power and parallelism of the huge APU die-area given over to modern GPUs. Being able to interact much more directly with the underlying graphics hardware helps us to both render our image previews at high quality, and not to sacrifice scroll / zoom performance: having our cake and eating it too. We've also used some of that power to not only significantly accelerate our image rendering, but also improve its quality too from before:

There is a fair bit more work to get OpenGL …

• Quick mail check, morning off - out for a walk with J. along a rather perplexing Devil's Dyke nearby - apparently each end used to be an impassable fen / swamp. Nice to wander along.

• Mail chew; worked on marketing, ploughed through tedious tasklets, sales call, partner call, another sales call. Worked on a write-up of 4.4 things you can't see in the evening too.

• Mail chew; great to see the Android Editing Tender announced by TDF. Naturally I (and another board member) was recused from that discussion / decision. My hope is that after the heavy lifting is out of the way, it will become much easier to get more people involved there. The work itself has a has a large element of generic tiled-rendering functionality which is re-usable in a number of situations to improve rendering performance. Reading Miklos' nice write up of some of the work so far.
• Lunch. Reviewed my notes from the ODF plug-fest. Sync. with Thorsten.
• Up late replacing J's cracked glass on her Galaxy S3 - managed to buy all the necessary bits, incluing a heat-gun for 20% of the cost of having it replaced by the cheapest shop I could find; thank God it still works.

• Mail chew, 1:1's with the guys; lunch with J. Product team call; more mail chew, sync. with Sam; Consulting team call; more mail churn. Dinner, babes to bed, more admin. Pleased to see the progress that Noel has made on the feature/vclref branch.

• Up early; walked to the venue; debugged the xmloff CustomShape engine feature - apparently not working; started to dig into it, eventually made my own engine & started building some shapes too. Series of talks on what had been achieved; had to leave early to get a train. Home to the family.
• The thing I worked on during the hackday was getting at least some start made to the problem of having a QR code engine built-in; courtesy of zint's backend (finding the best version of zint, which seems un-maintained, is remarkably hard - perhaps at some stage we'll want to replace it with a good internal solution). Anyhow - after some significant chew we have a custom-shape in the feature/barcode branch that renders something like this: It was interesting to find & fix the functionality that allows you to enter:
  <draw:custom-shape draw:style-name="gr1" ... draw:engine="org.libreoffice.draw.barcode" draw:data="QR code contents">
  This apparently lets you create and associate arbitary (even say python) components as 'engines' to render the content of custom-shapes - which is interesting; although apparently not-used; I had to fix that first. Hopefully this can open up a world of pretty & fun new user-created functionality creating and embedding document elements in simple scripting languages.
  Of course - lots still remains to be done before this can be useful - and most likely there is a better way of doing it. My hope is that the rest of the code there allows a fall-back to be serialized for users without the required plugin, but I imagine it will need quite some tweaking yet; why not come and play at FOSDEM or the LibreOffice hackfest immediately afterwards. Update posted some technical bits to the dev-list too.

• Up in the dark & cold, trains, on an Intercity and well on the way to Cardiff by 9am; pleased with laptop power there too.
• Struggled with CMake - gdcm refusing do as its bid, configuring from a build directory, but still it fails; turns out configuring in the source directory pollutes things to the point that it then fails to configure even if you're elsewhere: funky. Stuck into some interactive CMake thing that would't let me build the makefiles, despite a clean configure and no errors: wow; eventually tweaked around the un-reported error.
• Arrived, walked to the venue; missed the pitches. Met Malcolm and various others; long discussions about paper vs. electronic records - didn't get any DICOM work done - instead started on some QR code pieces.
• Building closed early, out to a bar to meet other interesting parties around the place. Late night kebab & walk to the hotel.

• Into Cambridge for Quarterly meetings; good to catch up with Philippe, Tracie & Guy; go over the positives & areas for improvement together - had lunch as we worked, drew up some projections.
• Home earlyish. Tea - Naomi B. over to play, babes watched Moonacre, put them to bed, watched the next Harry Potter in the series with the biggers.

• Set an alarm on my Galaxy S4 - why is it that the whole 'alarming' bit of alarms is missing; some anaemic 'bling bong bop' that happens a couple of times & gives up seems to be normal these days. It reminds me of the Onion's sounds of the rainforest fire-alarm; the urgent, incrementing volume, irritating beep setting has eluded me somehow.
• Nice write-up of the LibreOffice on Android viewer from Serdar @ InfoWorld.
• Tried to dig out a simple Microsoft OpenGL sample without much luck: disappearing cubes left/right; eventually found one - upgraded Visual Studio to install MFC - which forced a re-boot (goodness!).
• Lunch; booked train to the Cardiff / NHS Hackfest this weekend.

Today Collabora released (cf. Press Release) a Beta snapshot of the viewer work we've been doing for and with SMOOSE for some months. This provides a version for testing (it's really not finished yet), of LibreOffice running on Android you can install it from Google Play.

What does it look like ?

The writer functionality is probably the best piece of the component, allowing pleasant screen-shottage and rather good viewing.

What did that involve ?

A huge amount of work. Much of the initial work was done by Tor Lillqvist, while at SUSE (now Collabora), creating a cross-compilation framework which we continue to use for iOS, Android and was originally setup to do cross-compiles to Windows - so that we could have a predictable toolchain, and a reliable/repeatable free-software build environment. Tor also did some amazing bootstrapping work to overcome several debilitating limitations of C++ on Android, get to get the initial startup, and packaging into a good state.

Matus Kukan (Collabora) also did a chunk of work for CloudOn to help link the entirety of LibreOffice into a single shared library image - helping startup performance & improving Android support. This significantly helps to work around the built-in Android linker's low limit of shared libraries it can handle before failing. It also helps to export nearly no symbols, and to let ld's garbage-collection throw away as much object code as possible: though there is still way more to loose.

Other work done for CloudOn by Jan Holesovsky (Collabora) and Tor Lillqvist was to implement tiled rendering inside Writer - making it possible to render arbitrary portions of documents at arbitrary zoom factors. We are deeply indebted to them - you can of course enjoy the same code inside CloudOn's iOS app.

Ian Billet worked during the Google Summer of Code 2012 to make a document browser, which has subsequently been taken over and much improved by Jacobo Pérez of Igalia creating the document browser we have today. It is of course somewhat regrettable that Android has no standard built-in file browser making this necessary. Of course the viewer also hooks into the OS to allow opening downloads, attachments etc. in the normal way.

Since FOSDEM 2014, Smoose and Collabora in the person mostly of Tomaz worked to re-target the excellent Fennec tiled-rendering code from Mozilla's android browser to target instead of the Mozilla core - the LibreOffice core. This involved great chunks of re-factoring, and hard work both in the Android and C++ core. We re-use and added tiled rendering to the LibreOfficeKit API - an API to allow simple re-use of LibreOffice for file format conversion and document rendering via a rather trivial C and C++ API. LibreOfficeKit under Linux has the advantage of requiring no linkage to …

• To work early, polled the play store in a loop, encouraged to see that Tomaz had found a big performance win as well as the cause of some missing tiles in our Android Alpha; spreadsheet tile positioning and text sizing still seems to be off however; hmm.

• Slept well for a change; into Cambridge - chewed mail on the train; call when I got in; built ESC stats. Quarterly meetings. Paperwork in the evening, and out for a meal with Guy, Tracie & Philippe. Home late.