Szymon Kłos (Collabora) and Caolán McNamara (Red Hat) came up with a solution that allows the models that create the VCL dialogs to send JSON encoded widget information to clients who do not want to draw VCL (or GTK/QT) widgets.

Smartphones have a small screen and are usually only used with one or two fingers.Īs a completely new UI implementation for touch devices would increase the maintenance cost significantly the Collabora engineers started to look for a different approach that makes it possible to reuse as much code as possible of the VCL based UI stack we have in LibreOffice. While the interface on Chromebooks has roughly the same requirements as on iPads, the story looks different for Android phones. Meanwhile, Collabora also started to work on an Android and later also on a version for Chromebooks and it became clear, that the VCL based dialogs won’t be a good fit for those platforms. This is how the main menu looked like in December 2018: This implementation was targeted to users who work with a mouse and a keyboard, but it was not yet fully optimized for a touch only environment, like the iPad. In the initial releases the user interface was more or less borrowed from what Collabora Online offered. 2018) we first had to create a solid foundation to get the large LibreOffice code base reliably working on iOS. When Collabora and Adfinis started the journey of bringing LibreOffice to iOS (Oct. The NotebookBar – a Simpler and Better User Interface This blog posts highlights some technical details and explains why this release is so crucial.

Note: if you want to learn about the history of this project you should also check the first and the second blog post in this series!Īfter roughly two years of hard work driven by Collabora the latest upgrade of their LibreOffice based on iOS and Android app shines with many UI and UX improvements, better performance, important bug fixes and new features. Version 6.4 is a major upgrade of the LibreOffice based office suite on your Apple and Android mobile device!

Libreoffice tablet android