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  cuckooo: OpenOffice.org nested in KDE
Applications Posted by Jan Holesovsky on Tuesday 19/Aug/2003, @10:08
from the build-your-own-nest dept.
Have you ever dreamt of OpenOffice.org integration in KDE? Perhaps you should try cuckooo, a KDE Part which allows OpenOffice.org to be run in a Konqueror window. It is currently limited to just viewer capabilities, but as you can see from the screenshots, the technology is promising. You can of course download and try it, but please be patient with it. Cuckooo is at a very early stage of development, so you might encounter debug info on the standard error output, misbehavior or even crashes. But if you are willing to test it, I am looking forward to feedback!


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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
impressed
by ac on Tuesday 19/Aug/2003, @11:24
I find it exceedingly interesting that you managed to accomplish this before the Bonobo guys, especially when Ximian has been throwing money at it. Says a lot about the power of KDE component technology and perhaps your own hacker skills. Great job!
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Network
by Daan on Tuesday 19/Aug/2003, @11:36
Does it also work via network - so that if you click a link to a .doc document on a website, you can view it immediately? That's what I like about Word integration in IE. For the rest, I think this is a great thing, because OO is still better than KOffice.
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Very cool!
by David Faure on Tuesday 19/Aug/2003, @11:37
Good stuff, congratulations for the integration (which is never easy since it requires to understand two different worlds :).

I hope that this doesn't create too much of a nightmare for packagers though - this stuff depends on both kdelibs-devel and the OOo source code (or devel packages?), to be compiled. No problem for users, of course.
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hehe
by anon on Tuesday 19/Aug/2003, @12:34
Nice project name and logo!
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Applescript like macros
by Tom on Tuesday 19/Aug/2003, @12:39
One thing I love about this idea is the possibilities it could throw open with tools like DCOP, KJSEmbed and even Kommander. Just imagine, you throw together a psuedo-application using a point-and-click GUI that will, with a keystroke or mouse click, go through lots of documents and perform complicated tasks like formatting, spellchecking, etc, putting OO together with other KDE apps. No need to sit and learn to script (DCOP, Applescript), nor to put up with simple macros that only work within the given application (any office app).

Of course there's nothing (except time & code!) stopping this from happening with KOffice, but for the moment OO has the lead on support for things like MS Word, and it's more likely to be adopted by businesses.

It might also be cool to experiment with KJSEmbed, splitting OO up into many modular components and making it easy for people to make their own office suite, piecing together the parts they need. I, for example, only seem to use the basic text formatting tools, bullet/number points, footnotes and occasionally embedded charts and graphs. It'd be fun and probably useful to be able to make my "own" kword/kspread app that had a GUI I custom made for my needs.
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Cool
by gunnar on Tuesday 19/Aug/2003, @12:44
using Qt widgets and fully kde integration would be great!!! i am looking forward to what will come!!!
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koffice?
by kde user on Tuesday 19/Aug/2003, @13:08
> Have you ever dreamt of OpenOffice.org integration in KDE? No. But I have dreamt (and many with me) about a stable, neat and functional KOffice.
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Really impressed ..
by nx_in on Tuesday 19/Aug/2003, @13:45
But can you tell something about its performance? I mean how much time does it take to display a *.sxw or a *.sxc file ?
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KOpenOffice
by Anton Velev on Tuesday 19/Aug/2003, @20:57
Hello buddy,
Really nice job, how functional is it?

It was the one I dreamt and would like to contribute.
Seems that someone (you) who has time read the post (thanks for the referrence).

With your touch, now koffice is mature office suite! You are saving millions of years to kword, kspread, kpresenter, etc team, now they can just drop this parts and use the real ones that come from Sun team.

After some porting to kde/qt widgets this will really look like regiar kde office. This will be nice because then it will adapt to my current theme instead of using some old gray style. Replacing old koffice components with OO components will make koffice the best office suite for my KDE, until now it was OO from Sun. OO is good, not good as msoffice but enough good to use it because of it's crossplatform portability.
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OK, but basically worthless
by SupetPET Troll on Tuesday 19/Aug/2003, @22:00
in my opinon (since this is a place to voice it). I think OO sucks, sucks a lot. I really wonder how many people use OO on a regular basis. This last spring semester, I thought I would try to use it for all my lab reports and papers I needed to write for univ. I turned from thinking OO could replace MS Office, to spending a lot more time in the Win2K lab in the EE building. Basically, I find OO terrible.

My number one compaint with it is its speed, which also contains an amusing anecdote. In Linux, OO writer takes like about 13-20sec (avg of about 16) -- and yes I ran it 10 times in a row and then ran it another 10 times with it being the only other thing open besides running KDE HEAD. It didn't really make too much of a difference when I had like 3 Konquerors, KMail, KJots, Kate, and 2 Konsoles -- about an additional second. Now the amusing part. In Windows XP, it takes no more than 8seconds to open and usally about 5seconds. I ran it 10 times in row in XP and got almost the same exact startup speed. My computer isn't too slow either. I have a XP 2500+ (Barton) with 256KB of PC2700 and a Seagate 60GB HD running in UDMA4 (I think). At any rate hdparm -tT reports about 50MB/s transfer speed and I'm running resier so I guess what like 15-20MB/s of actual bandwidth.

2) It is a general hacky feeling to the UI and GUI. I think it suffers from your standard OSS/FS application problem. Usability. More than once, I've tried to do something and could not figure out how to do it. Going to the OO irc channel is worthless. I've tried 3 times for help them and got nothing. After the 2nd time I wasn't going to go back, but I did and of cource got not help. Every time I was there, either got no answer or believe it or not "I'm just a developer I've never really used it too much. Try like #linpeople or something, or use the email lists." Then the GUI problem, is I think its kind of ugly, and what's with the mouse cursor. It reminds me of using the old Sun machines at school. I will say one thing, it has been getting more responsive with most every release though. Still its a bit "draggy" at some times. 3) Stability. This is the main reason I had to stop using OO and go to MS Office. EVERY time I would write a lab report (those who are in univ know they're common especially for EE classes more than CS) I needed to add at least 1 graph. Well guess what would happen, it would crash trying to paste the graph into OO Writer from the speadsheet. Or trying to move the graph around would crash it.

4) One last thing that needs working on with OO is this and it makes me so fucking mad I could scream. Why the HELL is there no up-one-line "action". There is down-one-line, but not up. Why? There is even "return to the beginning of the page or sentence or whatever" but not up one line. The only reason I can think of is that most OO developers are, basically, mad. Completely mad. And maybe it is just the Windows version that does not have an "up one line" action.

At any rate, a good office suite is what the OSS/FS community lacks. It is really what most people use so much. Hopefully this next KOffice suite can at least equal OO if not surpase it. With KDE's integration (kparts) and its decent usability and look, KOffice could be one application that could switch office workers over to Linux and Unixware (j/k).
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Very Nice
by AC on Tuesday 19/Aug/2003, @23:07
This is very very nice. Does anyone know what the current KOffice developers think of it? It would mean dumping years of work for them, right?
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kmozillapart
by Anonymous on Tuesday 19/Aug/2003, @23:35
This is maybe a good time to revive/update the kmozillapart too.
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KOffice
by Dan on Tuesday 19/Aug/2003, @23:41
I think would be better spend time with Konqueror importing OO MsOffice filters to KOffie or fixing the problems as Tables or the management of big files (KOffice usually crashes when you are working with big files). I think this is the practical way. Regards.
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Kaddressbook for mail-merge
by kde-user on Wednesday 20/Aug/2003, @01:55
that's great! The next step I hope for is the integration of Kaddressbook into OpenOffice for mail-merge...
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KDe
by Wurzelgeist on Wednesday 20/Aug/2003, @05:46
A integration of the GUI is more important for me. There is a script to use your own icon set in OO.org. So where is the controlcenter integration, when I select crystal icons I also want them to get used in OO.org.

also the menu shall be according to KDe standards. I don't care about gui toolkits, i care about look and feel.


If Ximian integrates OO to Gnome, nic. I want the same to be done for KDe.
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Offtopic..
by schnitzelkopf@dasheißePost.com on Wednesday 20/Aug/2003, @08:47
Perhaps a bit offtopic, but why is every newline removed from the messages on this page?

Testing.. 1, 2, 3.. this line was written on a new line.
This one as well.
And this one too.
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impressive
by standsolid on Wednesday 20/Aug/2003, @22:45
This is quite cool... quite cool indeed. It would be really nifty to have a KPART that could act like a WM to whatever program. for instance.... zsnes that way you could embed (insert non-kde app) as a kpart -- cool.

I'm not sure why so many peoples here feel that porting OpenOffice.org to the qt toolkit is so easy because "Ximian did it with gnome". i'm prety sure that Ximian's openoffice isn't gtk2 (although i could easily be mistaken correct me if i'm wrong).

I feel that koffice is a worthwhile pursuit and shouldn't be "dumped". It's essential for KDE's success (and eventually KGX). While this is a good devleopment, I feel that improving KOffice is really the way to go. KOffice is a REALLY good office suite for what it is (free [beer, speech], and little commercial support).

thanks koffice -- keep it up (hopefully you can benefit from code in openoffice, hm?)

thanks to cuckoo -- excelent work. look forward to further updates
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I always like pretty qt-stuff
by Schugy on Saturday 23/Aug/2003, @09:19
I'm waiting for the day when we just have a few libs like libgecko.so or libOO.so and can use the design we want to. QT is already loaded with klipper/Konqueror (takes a while to load the 1st qt-app in other WMs) and it should decrease the start time.

But be careful because integration often leads to vulnerabilities.
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