Mobility WAS: Re: Open-Xchange to launch open-source, browser-based office suite

[Louis Suárez-Potts <lu...@gmail.com>]

On 13-03-27, at 12:36 , Malte Timmermann <ma...@gmx.com> wrote:

> 
snip

> If you want to give me more details about the OOXML/ODF viewing stuff, please come back on me via private email (but not the one I am using here) or linkedin :)
Sure. 
Publicly available works for mobile devices include those you can download from the iOS app store, such as UX Write*, Symphony, FileLApp Pro—these are all native—and provide for viewing. Others exist, too; viewing ODF text (and some more than that) is not hard. Editing and then expressing as ODF is harder—and it remains to be seen how desirable, in full.

Personally, I argue for Good Enough. Few will do complex documents on a tablet, at least at this point, and so why have capabilities for that? Better to have a good enough approach that allows for noncomplex (but equally nontrivial) usage.

HTML does a splendid job of this—that's the approach that UX Write is taking.

Apps that utilize HTML5, such as rollApp seem to have a brilliant future but that's a future whose sun has not risen yet. We all know the cybersphere is coming (just before the Singularity which is followed by Skynet and then the Armageddon bodied by Arnold the Terminator), but ubiquitous fast connectivity is not here yet. And even in places where it does exist, such as So. Korea, how used *is* HTML5 for apps, as in the Web services model? Data, anyone? (not sure if games count.)

Others working on this—mobile editing of ODF—include, I have no doubt, those at Ko.GmbH, and probably also many others.

Outside of ODF, there are quite a few viewers but very few editors and even fewer that would seem to work well for actual people. Iv'e tried most, if not all. They work fine; sans keyboard, and on a plane, very nicely. With a keyboard, they are effectively netbooks. But here's the issue, again: You don't need OOo on them or in them, you just need an editor that can express ODF, in some useable version, so that devices fully equipped with ODF editors can read/write the document. 

I'll write more directly, but there is a huge market for tablets equipped with ODF editors. Think education in rich and poor countries (there's seemingly less of a difference, now), and think of the trash that would not be produced using thin clients—whoops, I mean, tablets.




> 
>> 
>> Oh, then there is accessibility. You remember that, yes? :-)
> 
> I remember - I had so much fun with that ;)
> 
> But honestly: Accessibility is such an important and interesting (and difficult) topic that I already volunteered to take care for that inside OX too…

I speculate if it would not be rather cool to have a kind of manifesto that ODF supporting apps and projects could agree to proclaiming the importance of accessibility in design and function. It's implicit in what we do and also explicit; but it's also not as public or broadcast as it could be, and the design principles seem sometimes opaque to too many.


> 
> Malte.
> 
best
louis
> 


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