Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club

Some big news on the OpenOffice.org front: this report from the OpenOffice.org conference held earlier this month reveals plans to integrate the MozillaThunderbird email client and Mozilla Sunbird calendaring application into the OpenOffice.org suite, and to implement a Mozilla-like extensions system to OpenOffice.org. Hopefully this means more than just additional bloat to an already heavy set of applications. If currently core components of OpenOffice.org are sliced off into optional loadable modules, it could be possible to open a particular kind of document in OpenOffice.org and only load those components necessary for working with that document type. That has the pontential to reduce loading time, system resource use, and interface clutter. This would work particularly well with modular document types like XHTML 1.1, which has been designed specifically for this kind of use. It will be nice to see development of Sunbird get an added kick, as well.

The OpenOffice.org documentation team have also launched a template/clipart competition, with some pretty nice cash incentives for contributing your designs to the community.