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Intel joins the Document Foundation, pimps LibreOffice
You're forgiven if you missed this little blip on the news radar: Intel has joined the advisory board of the Document Foundation and added the coalition's LibreOffice to the AppUp market. What's more, Chipzilla actually worked with SUSE to help optimize the free and open source office suite for Intel hardware and, as part of the advisory board, will be providing the project with significant monetary support. This is good news for fans of LibreOffice, but it's probably not sitting well with Microsoft -- normally Intel's ally and current king of the office suite hill.
LibreOffice updates to version 3.5, brings grammar check, bigger Calc workbooks, and more
Microsoft recently outed a preview of MS Office 15, so it's fitting that the Document Foundation has taken the wraps off the next major release of Office's open source competition, LibreOffice. Among the new features is a bundle of upgrades for its word processor, including a built-in grammar checker and a real-time word count window. Its PowerPoint equivalent, Impress, received the ability to embed multimedia and custom color palettes among others upgrades, while the spreadsheet software, Calc, now supports up to 10,000 sheets per workbook. Version 3.5 also reintroduces an online update checker to make it easy to keep LibreOffice up to date. All total, 30,000 code commits went into the improvements, so if you're on the open source office suite bandwagon, don't let that hard work go to waste -- check out the fruits of their labor at the source link below.
A spreadsheet based music tracker: get ready to rock your accounts (video)
Art and geekery: two sides of the same coin. A fact wonderfully demonstrated by this spiffy spreadsheet-based music sequencer. Live-coder and all-round music hacker Patrick -- aka cappel:nord -- spotted the LibreOffice spreadsheet's sonic potential and decided to work his magic. The result is demonstrated in the video below. Sure, it's a little bit senza functionally, but it does appear to have velocity control, based on the cell's number value, as well as effects. Not bad for what the creator claims was "a three hour hack". Sadly there's sparse detail on how exactly the task was accomplished, but if you know your quavers from your variables, grab the source code by tapping the via after the jump.
Lapdock 100 brings a Webtop IQ boost to Moto phones on Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T
Looking to harness all the power of your smartphone PC-style? Motorola is looking to help with its Lapdock 100 for a number of devices, including the Atrix 2, Photon 4G and Droid Bionic. The laptop shell sports a 10.1-inch screen (smaller and hopefully cheaper than the Atrix 4G's axed lapdock), keyboard with dedicated Android keys, touchpad, multi-tasking and tabbed web-browsing via WiFi or your phone's data plan. You'll also be able to utilize a full Firefox browser, Adobe Flash, Quick Office, Google Docs and a PC-esque File Manager. Just in case your smartphone's SD card doesn't offer enough storage space, the dock packs two USB ports for all those extra documents you might collect. Looking to stay ultra-portable, the peripheral weighs a hair over two pounds (less than 1Kg) and touts five hours of battery life -- which can also be used to recharge that tired handset if needed. If you're looking to snatch up one of these bad boys, you'll have to wait until October 17... and even then, it'll only hit shelves at AT&T. Verizon and Sprint customers will get their chance "later this quarter" and there's no word yet on pricing. Need more info? Hit that coverage link for product page and get yourself better acquainted.
CE-Oh no he didn't!: Stephen Elop says 'Apple created Android,' the conditions necessary for its existence
Nokia's freshman CEO is speaking at the Open Mobile Summit right now. As expected, he's covering the same ol' ground, explaining why Nokia ditched Symbian and MeeGo to build the "third ecosystem" with Microsoft -- you know, after totally dominating the high-end smartphone market just three years ago. He's also being credited with the following quote: "Apple created Android, or at least created the conditions necessary for Android to come into being" We're on to you, Mr. Elop. It's a classic diversionary tactic. Get the one and two smartphone / tablet OS vendors squabbling and then execute a flanking maneuver while nobody's watching. Why else would the Nokia CEO make such an emotive claim? Unless it's true?
NeoOffice 3 available for download
We had a lot of mail from users eager to let us know that the NeoOffice 3.0 is now available. NeoOffice is a Mac OS X native open-source office suite originally crafted from the code used for OpenOffice, and its developers are boasting about the following features not found in the current release of OpenOffice for Mac: OS X Services support Media Browser support Native floating tool windows Magnify and swipe trackpad gestures Menus available when no documents are open Import images from scanners and cameras Command-clicking on window titlebar Mac OS X Leopard grammar checking support A more in-depth look at these features can be found here. The suite is a fantastic alternative to paying full price for Microsoft Office and has come a long way in the past few years. NeoOffice 3.0 is a universal binary offers separate Intel and PPC packages, and it requires OS X 10.4 or higher, 512 MB of RAM and 400 MB of free disk space. Please note that Universal Access support from OpenOffice is not available on NeoOffice at this time, so using OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, or iWork is suggested to access that feature. A token donation is requested of all downloaders to help support the project.
Microsoft: Linux and others violate 235 of our patents
If you thought that Microsoft's deal with Novell was the end of Redmond v. Linux litigation, think again. In an unsettling story carried by Fortune over the weekend, Microsoft's General Counsel claims that free and open-source software (FOSS) violates exactly 235 Microsoft patents: Linux kernel (42), Linux GUI (65), Open Office suite (45), email (15), and then another 68 patents violated across a variety of FOSS wares -- the first time Microsoft has provided such specificity. Microsoft goes so far as to claim that that is the reason for open-source software's high-quality. However, Eben Moglen, legal counsel to the Free Software Foundation and head of the Software Freedom Law Center, says that software is a mathematical algorithm which can not be patented and easily "invented around" -- a case made even stronger last month by the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling undermining patent trolls. Still, FOSS allies such as Sony, Philips, Novell, Red Hat and NEC were already banded together under the Open Invention Network with their own collection of patents meant to protect themselves from the kind of litigious quagmire Microsoft seems poised to launch. Ironically, that very pact between Microsoft, Novell, and more recently Dell makes Microsoft an uneasy Linux distributor (depending upon your legal interpretation of the deal) which could leave them powerless to bring patent suits against Linux customers and distributors. With Microsoft facing the Google goliath and a general consumer malaise, it's really no surprise to find them prepped for a patent offensive in search of additional revenue. However, our biggest fear is for this sudden increase in posturing by Ballmer and Co. to turn into a full blown series of lawsuits and countersuits sure to stifle innovation into the next decade. [Via Scobleizer]
Sun joins OpenOffice Mac Porting Project
Fans of OpenOffice, the open source alternative to MS Office, rejoice! Sun, the company that puts the dot in .com, has just announced that they are joining the OpenOffice Mac porting project. What does this mean? It means that the chances of a Aqua version of OpenOffice materializing has just gone way up. Jim Parkinson even suggests that Sun might port StarOffice (which is the version of OpenOffice that Sun distributes itself) to OS X.Thanks, Mark.
