The latest release of Collabora Office 25.04 for Android, iOS and ChromeOS brings powerful document editing and viewing to your fingertips, backed by the same technology that powers our flagship product, Collabora Online. The mobile app offers a highly capable WYSIWYG experience – perfect for quick edits, document reviews, or presentations on the move. For the full-featured, real-time collaborative experience, don’t miss the Collabora Online 25.04 announcement!

Built on the same powerful engine as Collabora Online, our mobile version continues to provide rich document editing capabilities while optimising the interface for touch and small screens. That means your documents render precisely and behave as expected — including complex formatting, change tracking, charts, and styles. It’s the same powerful engine under the hood, optimised for quick access and portable productivity.

With new features and enhancements focused on performance, usability, and compatibility, Collabora Office for Mobile is the perfect companion to your desktop and cloud-based workflows.

New to try in 25.04

Video Support in the Mobile App

Collabora Office 25.04 now supports playback of existing videos embedded in presentations. Simply open the file and hit presentation mode—your video content will play as expected, right from your device.

Desktop-Like Tablet Experience

Using a tablet? You’ll find a user interface that closely resembles the desktop version – unlocking access to more advanced tools and bringing a familiar editing experience. Plus, better support for external keyboards and mice makes productivity on tablets feel more like a desktop.

Better Clipboard Support

Copying and pasting just got more powerful! On Android, clipboard support has been improved (within platform limits), and on iOS you can now even copy spreadsheet formulas—maintaining logic, not just plain text.

Smoother Touch Interactions

The mobile app just feels better. We’ve improved the responsiveness of scrolling and gestures to make touch interactions more fluid, smart, and snappy – so you can navigate long documents or spreadsheets with ease.

Faster Loading with LoadURL

Collabora Office 25.04 includes a significant performance improvement on Android devices that tackles a longstanding problem in the WebView’s loadUrl method. Previously, large documents could stall as WebView struggled with long Base64 tile strings—leading to slow or frozen loading experiences.

With the LoadURL optimisation, this has been fully addressed using a WebSocket-based workaround, bypassing the bottleneck and eliminating duplicate tile requests. The result? Faster, smoother document loads and scrolling, so Android users enjoy a responsive and reliable mobile experience

The post Collabora Office 25.04 for Mobile – Fast, Friendly, and Feature-Filled appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Fixing a critical loadurl performance issue under Android

• July 8, 2025
• Mobile, Support
• No Comments

TL;DR

Stalls in document loading were traced back to issues with the long-string handling abilities of Android’s Webview loadUrl method. Implementing an alternative websocket-based approach eliminated the problem.

Introduction

Everyone wants snappy scrolling and quick loading documents, so a design issue in the Android Webview loadurl method appeared to make the Collabora Online Android app fail to load documents was of critical concern, as it seriously impacted the end-user experience.

A user-reported GitHub issue seemed to indicate that larger documents were failing to load or only load in part. The initial investigation into the problem highlighted that the root of the issue wasn’t that the document failed to load, more it was rendering impossibly slowly, giving the appearance of a load failure. Once the issue was confirmed, it was tagged as a high priority and assigned to our Android developer Skyler to fix.

Behind the scenes

Collabora Online is available for both iOS and Android devices. To enable the mobile app to function offline or with interrupted or poor network connections it utilises its own local coolwsd – the server that renders and streams image tiles of your documents to the client so they can be viewed and edited. Coolwsd renders the documents being viewed into 256×256 raster tiles, with the original reported implementation these are base64 encoded – to safely transport the UTF8-encoded strings – and loaded by the browser client. This should be a smooth uninterrupted process, which it was not.

Our assigned developer Skyler implemented performance profiling to try and narrow down and locate the issue. The first move was to run testing on iOS to see if it was suffering the same performance issue, it wasn’t, so this appeared to be an Android-specific issue.

Profiling the issue

The first step in assessing the issue was to devise suitable profiling and debugging. The initial flame graph for the system seemed to indicate that either the system was sending way too many tiles or the tiles that were being sent were taking an age to be processed.

Analysing the browser logs revealed 105,707 tile messages, so there were a large number of tiles being processed but none of them were actually making it to the user’s screen. At this point it made sense to see if it was possible to optimise the situation either through better prioritising or removing duplicate requests, then see if that alleviated the issue.

Further log analysis showed that a whopping 91% of tiles were duplicates. Implementing a patch to remove duplicates still led to an enormous number of invalid tile requests. After testing under the Core and the Desktop versions, Skyler logged to see if tiles were being sent unrequested and they were, alongside a large amount of duplicate tiles.

After investigating the duplicate tile issue, Skyler developed a prototype patch to help reduce the number of duplicate tiles resulting in a reduction in lag, but the rending speed still remained slower than it should.

LoadUrl was the culprit all along!

The actual culprit for the performance hit turned out to be Android’s Webview loadUrl method, which doesn’t like handling very large strings. The encoded tiles have to be passed to the browser in the form of a very large string as part of a Javascript function through a fake websocket. An initial solution was to send anything over 1,024 bytes through a HTTP request with a short message still going through Javascript to the Webview. This led to the final patch set that created an Android MobileSocket, based on the existing ProxySocket – implemented to work around PHP’s timeout limits and situations involving strict firewalls that don’t allow websocket connections.

The most striking way to experience the difference in performance is to watch the before and after videos, which are night and day in performance terms. Delving into the system tasks the main culprit was the WebViewChromium.loadUrl task, this was in effect stuck trying to load tiles until the user gave up on it. The final fix still uses this task, but only for message polling all the tile data goes through the MobileSocket.

The end result is vastly faster document loading when viewed against the earlier releases. You can find the 25.04.2 Android release of Collabora Office, which includes this work, on the Google Play Store.

Try it yourself, get the apps!

Download Collabora Office for iOS and Android:

iOS Apple App Store

Android Google Play

Download the Android APK

Learn more

Collabora Online Development Edition

Head over to the docs or start by following our step-by-step instructions and build CODE from scratch.

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The post Fixing a critical loadurl performance issue under Android appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

All the latest features in your pocket

Following on from our latest releases for Collabora Online in your browser and Collabora Office for desktop, we are pleased to announce Collabora Office for Android and iOS 24.04 is now available to download. Our mobile apps is built upon the foundations of our flagship product, Collabora Online, and enjoys full interoperability with the functions you find in your browser along with pixel-perfect rendering of documents built online and vice versa. However, to enhance the user experience the interface has been simplified to maximise usability on a mobile device.

Improvements to the user experience in the latest update include:

• A wider comments section to view collaborative discussions more easily on your mobile device.
• A save progress bar has been added to the navigation bar providing visual confirmation of a save action.
• A cleaner top toolbar introduced to further streamline mobile usability.

Additional updates include:

• A smoother user experience when navigating through menus and sub-menus.
• Smarter handling of context menus for inactive tabs in Calc.
• Smoother panning of spreadsheets within Calc.

In addition to your phone, these apps are optimised for iPads (iPadOS) and Chromebooks (ChromeOS), and run online or offline – there is no need for Internet connectivity.

View, share and edit documents on the go with Collabora Office for Android and iOS.

Collabora Office for Android

Collabora Office for iOS

The post Collabora Office 24.04 for Mobile appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Powerful Office Productivity in Your Pocket

Cambridge, September 21, 2023 – Today we are pleased to announce the availability of a new major release of Collabora Office for Android and iOS. This updated version of our free app includes new and improved productivity features, greater document compatibility and a much improved user experience.

Today’s world of work is far more distributed and mobile. Collabora Office for Android and iOS allows you to edit documents directly on your phone or tablet, maintaining your privacy and putting you in full control of your data and documents, any time, any place.

The apps for Android and iOS complete our enterprise-ready Collabora Office product range – consisting of desktop versions for Linux, MacOS and Windows and our flagship product Collabora Online.

New Features

Dark Mode

The widely requested dark mode functionality that was added in Collabora Online 23.05 has come to mobile. There are multiple ways to activate dark mode – either from the main screen, or whilst in a document.

• From the Home Screen, select the hamburger icon in the top left, click ‘Settings’, ‘Choose theme’ and choose between ‘Dark’ ‘Light’ or ‘System default’.
• From within a document, select the hamburger icon in the top right, click ‘View’ and select ‘Dark Mode’. To switch off, do the same and untick ‘Dark Mode’.

Insert Form & Content Controls

You can now create forms and insert content controls in Writer, and export them into a fillable PDF file. This feature has been included from our Collabora Online 23.05 release.

• To insert a field on mobile, select the ‘Insert’ icon on the top right bar and scroll to the bottom, select ‘Form’. From there you can choose which content controls to insert.
• To modify the options, select the content control, re-select ‘Insert’, ‘Form’ and choose ‘Properties’.

Calc Sparklines

Calc has seen the addition of Sparklines and the ability to define spreadsheet print areas which were introduced in the Collabora Online 22.05 release.

Sparklines are mini-charts found in Microsoft’s XLSX format. There are three different ways of displaying Sparklines: as lines, bar charts or stacked as win-loss charts. Sparklines are always defined for one cell, but different ones can be grouped together.

• To insert a Sparkline, long tap and scroll to the bottom of the ‘cut, copy’ dialog. Select ‘Sparkline’, customise the options, and select ‘OK’.
• To edit or remove, long tap on the Sparkline, scroll to the bottom of the ‘cut, copy’ dialog. Select ‘Sparkline’, and choose between the various edit and delete options.

Define Print Area

For anyone who has tried to print a large spreadsheet, you will know that having a defined print area is essential to avoid wasting paper or having cells spread across multiple pages. Now you can define print areas on the Collabora Office for Mobile Apps to easily print on-the-go.

• To define a print area, select the cells you want to be in the print area, click the hamburger menu in the top right corner and select ‘Define print area’.

Feature Improvements

Many already available features have seen improvements and updates in Collabora Office for Mobile 23.05. For example:

• More list options – newly added “Outline Format” and “No list” buttons.
• Improved Formula bar – the formula bar has been revamped. It’s now completely rendered on the client side. Also seeing many more enhancements such as better collapse and expand functionality and much better text selection handling.
• Improved Active Slide – when using Impress, the active or selected slide is now easier to discern with an outline style.

MobileWizard Popup

The MobileWizard popup is now being utilised in more dialog boxes for increased consistency throughout the app.

• Hyperlink panel – this has been completely revamped and improved. It’s now appears as a MobileWizard popup, making it easier to work with hyperlinks.
• Improved Comments – similarly to the hyperlink panel, this has been revamped in a MobileWizard popup and all the following actions are operated within the same place/component: View comment list, Modify comment, Reply comment and Insert comment.
• Improved Rename Sheet – long tap on a sheet tab then choose “Rename Sheet…”. This now uses the MobileWizard popup, making it easier to reach those input fields no matter the size of the smartphone.

Performance Improvements

Collabora Office 23.05 for mobile has received many performance improvements that we have been working on throughout the 22.05 life-cycle, and you will already see included in the Collabora Online core.

Collabora Office 23.05 on Tablet

The Collabora Office tablet apps have also seen some updates. Along with various performance and bug fixes, there are a few notable new feature improvements.

Rename Document Dialog

It is now possible to rename the current opened document without closing it. Before this change, or whenever the window was too small to show the document name, renaming from within the file was not possible. The user would have to use the native files app to do so.

• Now simply navigate to “File” tab, tap the “Rename” button. The “Rename Document” dialog appears and the user can rename the current document without leaving the app.

New Document Search Button

With the new “Search” button, it’s easier to trigger a document search without multiple clicks, even if the Status bar is hidden.

• Navigate to the “Home” tab and swipe left to see the last buttons in that tab. Tap “Search”.

Thanks to the Community

Collabora has invested significantly in bringing a host of new features and functionality to this latest release and contributes the vast majority of the Collabora Online code. However, this release is a community effort, and we fully appreciate and acknowledge everyone’s hard work that has made it possible! We want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues in the wider LibreOffice community who helped to contribute not only to this, but also to the underlying LibreOffice technology upon which CODE and Collabora Online are built.

All of our code is open source and available to the public on GitHub. Join the Collabora Online Community, take part in easy hacks and discussions in the forum.

Download Collabora Office for Mobile 23.05

Collabora Office for iOS, Android and Chrome OS is available through the Play Store and App Store. We also provide the latest snapshot .apk for Android for download! While the iOS version is already available to all users, the Android and Chrome OS releases will be rolled to Play Store users gradually. A vibrant and welcoming community has evolved around Collabora Online & Collabora Office – so if you would like to get in touch or get involved, visit us in the forum or at GitHub.

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity is a leading provider of innovative software solutions, catering to the needs of individuals and businesses worldwide. With a focus on usability, performance, and security, Collabora Online empowers users to accomplish their goals efficiently and effectively.

Collabora Office for Mobile 23.05 is the latest Android and iOS release of our widely integrated, secure office suite.

The post New Release for your Pocket – Collabora Office for Mobile 23.05 appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

The updated release of Collabora Office for Android and iOS now supports opening password protected documents and is available for F-Droid. Thus the open source app running on your mobile devices – mind that ChromeOS is supported too – is again gaining in both features and user support.

Now available for F-Droid!

Regularly users have asked us about the availability of Collabora Office for F-Droid, the community driven platform focusing on free and open source apps for Android. And now it’s here! Currently we provide two versions: the 4.2.x release – already longer existing, and the snapshot of the unstable 6.4 line. With the latter you can help us test the latest and greatest features! Something we really appreciate, so do contact us!

However, searching in the F-Droid site app list, you will not find it:

• Add the repo using the F-Droid community How To Guide.
• Add the following third party repository: https://www.collaboraonline.com/downloads/fdroid/repo/.
  

Collabora Office is the first fully functional mobile document editor for F-Droid. Thanks to the F-Droid community for helping to make this possible. Shortly we’ll publish a post adding more details to the story and possibly addressing some questions too.

How to get mobile Collabora Office?

Just install or update your Collabora Office app from the Play Store or App Store. And for F-Droid, see the info just above here!

Opening password protected documents

Just click on the document you’d like to open. In case it is a password-protected document Collabora Office will display the field for the password entry. Needless to say that this naturally works for text documents, spreadsheets and presentations alike, be it DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, ODT, ODS, ODP.

The post Collabora Office for mobile now available on F-Droid appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Cambridge, February 27th, 2020, 12:00 CET – Today we are releasing Collabora Office for Android and iOS which will allow you to edit documents directly on your phone or tablet, guaranteeing your privacy and putting you in full control of your data and documents. This release fully integrates the iOS and Android apps into our Collabora Office product family. They are now a supported part of our business suite and come with every Collabora Office Enterprise subscription. Take a look: it’s a great app: feature rich, providing smooth editing, a polished user experience and lots of design goodness.

Rich editing for mobile devices – developed with your privacy in mind!

Collabora Office for Android (minimal version 5.0) and iOS is fully open source and brings you slick and useful editing features, like rich copy and paste, that the competition fails to deliver.
The app does not depend on external storage or services, so can be used offline. There is no longer a reason to hand over your data to somebody else to get rich mobile editing. Thus you can regain control over your documents and edit them without compromising your privacy!

One-handed touch tools for all sorts of editing

Collabora Office allows tables to be changed easily and in many ways. Handles in the document, as well as an attractive palette of tools, helps you perfect your table layout.
In our new mobile app, you will find the features where you expect them to be, giving you access to powerful functionality.

Slides and sheets at your fingertips

Collabora Office for iOS and Android comes with a refined touch of usability. Sort the slides in your presentations using the convenient slide sorter. Scroll through the different sheets of your spreadsheet with the touch of a fingertip. Mobile document editing has never been easier and more fun.

Experience the polished user interface & design

Copy & paste rich text objects on mobile

Our mobile solution stands out from all its competitors because of the smooth way in which it facilitates editing on mobile devices. Collabora Office allows you to actually copy and paste rich document content on your iOS or Android device. Try it out!

Attractive icons and an attractive layout

Native platform document storage

Collabora Office gives you back control over your documents. This includes the freedom to decide where to store the documents you edit from your mobile device. Our app allows you to easily integrate with privacy respecting, open source storage services such as Nextcloud, ownCloud or Seafile as well as proprietary file services such as OneDrive, Dropbox etc. Naturally you can also store and edit documents locally on your device without an external storage space. We think it’s good to notice that all the features in Collabora Office are available for all users, independent if it’s for private or for business use.

Yet more polish

Smooth inertial scrolling has been added for this release, with significant work on performance and stability. We’ve added the ability to export to various different file formats, to provide a great collaboration and interoperability experience with the users of other apps. Many usability wins too numerous to mention have been implemented. We have bundled spell-checking for English, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and German for now – while we investigate shrinking the installation size to fit more. (Note selecting spell checking language currently is only on tablets.)

Two apps – one philosophy

Last year, we paved the road so that the development of our mobile apps would be more consistent. In particular, the completely new development of the iOS app blazed the train. Both apps now share a substantially common codebase with our flagship product Collabora Online.

After our successful implementation on iOS, we re-used the same approach for our Android app. This replaced the existing LibreOffice Viewer code which had seen only very little activity for a long time, creating a fully functional and productive mobile office solution.

Welcome to the Collabora Office family

With today’s release, the apps for Android and iOS have officially become a part of our Collabora Office for Enterprise product. The family is now complete. These mobile apps complement Collabora Online and our existing desktop versions for Linux, MacOS and Windows. What does this mean for you? We can provide SLAs for our customers, as well as a close product management relationship to help steer our future development. Each improvement or issue addressed for one solution (online, mobile, desktop) can enhance all the others. Last but not least, it means the consistent and sustainable development of the mobile software.

For use on F-Droid, please read the information on this page.

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Collabora invested huge effort and resources to bring into being a fully functional open source office suite for mobile devices. This success is built on the support of many individuals, the great LibreOffice community. Fundamentally this could not have been achieved without the support of SUSE, CloudOn, Smoose, Adfinis SyGroup and The Document Foundations’ generous historic donors. We cannot thank everyone involved enough for their passionate work. Please check our previous articles about the beta releases of the Android and iOS app, where we credit several of the people involved and where you can read more about their valuable contributions. All of our code is contributed to LibreOffice, and can be expected in LibreOffice 7, although we have our own theme. Would you like to be part of the story ? get involved today.

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud, providing Collabora Online and a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, it is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term, multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.

The post Collabora brings smooth editing to Android and iOS appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Great new interface and editing – in beta

What it looks like

More great interface details

 

 

 

 

The post New: Collabora Office for Android appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

For the first time there is a free / open source office suite available on iOS: Collabora Office, thanks to the efforts led by Adfinis SyGroup and Collabora. What started back in around 1992 as the well-known StarOffice, then was OpenOffice.org and now lives on as LibreOffice, is finally available on every relevant platform including (but not limited to) iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, Android¹, Chrome OS, Windows, Linux and also in the browser.

There is a lot we want to tell you about this first open source office app for iOS. In this blog we write a bit more on the technical part; the blog at Adfinis, has more focus on the interesting history.
But let us first show how it looks!

Get Collabora Office on iOS from the App Store

There are currently two possible ways to get the app:

1. Download Testflight through the Apple Store and use this link to join:
   This will give you the latest releases – which are not fully tested, and available to just try and test

2. Download the app through the Apple Store.

Over the past months, more than 60 versions have been released and the number of improvements and enhancements is for more than a hundred!

Built with online innovation

Collabora Online is built on technological innovation. And on a rich history, starting more than 30 years ago by StarOffice, following OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. We suggest you to read the blog post at Adfinis with interesting details. The innovative part was already mentioned in our first blog post. Collabora Office for iOS is built on the technology that was developed by Collabora to bring LibreOffice to the cloud. An important part of this technology is called LibreOfficeKit. This is a layer allowing to use the LibreOffice we all know on the server side and from there publish documents in the browser. And since LibreOffice is capable of opening the largest possible set of documents, Collabora Online has the same capability in nearly every modern browser!

And there is more that is interesting: the document on the screen is published as tiled images, which means that it doesn’t leave the server, which is especially useful for working online securely. The UI itself, for different platforms, is build with HTML/JS, on top off the VCL, the LibreOffice Visual Class Library. This enables the Collabora app to use many elements of the extensive functionality of LibreOffice’s UI.

A really nice advantage of this approach is that we cover three major scenarios with essentially this one solution:

• Online — see e. g. Collabora Online

• iOS — what we are presenting you now

• Android — work in progress, available through the Android Beta channel

This means that future improvements that are implemented for one platform will also benefit the other implementations.

Native look and feel & finger usage

Apple has put a lot of effort into creating great UX guidelines and great GUI widgets for iOS. However, VCL (the GUI toolkit used within the LibreOffice core) was born long before iOS and it doesn’t look and behave like a native iOS app. And even though development took the path of LibreOffice online, a lot of effort was needed in order to make VCL look, feel and behave more like an actual iOS app.

The sidebar makes settings easily accessible

A very important feature to make the app easier to use, is the sidebar. The sidebar contains contextual features and makes good use of the wide screens of the iPads.

Finger sized resize and rotate handles

Many tasks can be done with the fingers: resizing or rotating an image, change the size of a row or column in a table, etc.

The whole team has put a lot of effort in developing and testing those things work. And honestly we think that the result is quite nice.

Integrating iOS spellchecker

iOS offers spell checking as part of the basic system functionality. We integrated this functionality into the app. So now Collabora Office on iOS nicely uses the system spell checker in order to eliminate misspelled words!

GUI widgets in iOS style

Drop down menus and check boxes have their own style in Apple iOS and so we make the widget in Collabora look similar as much as possible. The result is nice and we’ll try to improve even further. This thanks to the work of for example Collabora developers Szymon Kłos, who wrote a blog post² about the work of using native widgets in the future, and Tomaž Vajngerl, who gave a presentation about Custom Widget Themes during the LibreOffice Conference 2019³ in Almeria.

Handles to select text in iOS style

The text handles look like those of a current iOS app. Currently they behave a bit differently and we work on improving this. That however turns out to be far from trivial.

Inserting pictures through the iOS camera / image gallery

Inserting pictures behaves like in any other app. You can either take a picture with the device camera or select one from your image gallery.

How this helps LibreOffice on Android

As already described above, Collabora leads the effort to use the same approach we use in the iOS app to deliver a new Android app.
During GSOC 2019 Kaishu Sahu did a great job and improved the Android app a lot. Jan Holesovsky (Collabora) is working to improve the situation even further and we should see a public release not too far in the future.
If you’re interested to learn more about the Android efforts or how to join, please contact Collabora.

What’s next for Collabora Office?

While we all work on further improvements, we there are very good reasons to be happy with what has been achieved so far And of course the good news is that you can experience that yourself.

For the near future, we already have the following things in mind:

• Create shiny templates

• Implement native widgets / improve UX

• Reduce latency

• Better support hardware keyboards (and shortcuts)

• Fix more rough edges

• Make more core features accessible (math formulas, image cropping, …)

• Reduce number of needed clicks for simple things (change cell background in a writer table, change text wrap of a picture, …)

Note that these points may change — this list is not a road map!

It’s your turn: you can help to make this better!

If you plan to use LibreOffice in an enterprise environment, whether on the desktop, on Android or on an iPad, we strongly recommend the enterprise ready version offered by Collabora. You’ll enjoy the advantages of an SLA, long-term support and last but not least it is a very good way to enhance the development of things like this iOS app!

Let’s be frank: money is very helpful to further speed up the development. So, if your organization plans to use LibreOffice on iOS (or any other platform) we’re happy to get you on board! Please don’t hesitate to contact Adfinis directly or Collabora Productivity to discuss possible ways to support the development.

Some words of thanks

This fantastic work would not be possible without the strong support and investment of Collabora and Adfinis SyGroup pays. Thanks to the entire crew that works hard every day to provide more free / open source solutions to the people out there!

(1 The Android App is still in Beta. The release is expected later this quarter.

For more information

Follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter or send us an email to hello@collaboraoffice.com

The post Collabora Office available as first free open source office app for iOS appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Contents

1. Suite improvements
2. Under the hood
3. Reaching out
4. Joining in

A continuous effort

Since January, Collabora’s engineers have been working on the next generation of LibreOffice for Android: a fully functional mobile office suite, running natively, ready to edit rich documents. Thanks to Document Foundation sponsorship, we’ve spent the last three months working intensively towards this vision. Today we’re delighted to present a new prototype with spreadsheet, slideshow, and text editing built-in.

Suite improvements

Like LibreOffice Desktop, LibreOffice for Android has separate components for different types of task. On Android, we include Writer, Calc, Draw, and Impress.

All components of the the prototype benefit from the following features:

• Text editing with on-screen keyboard
• Simple text formatting with bold, italic, underline and strikethrough
• Text selection by touching and holding part of a section of text (aka ‘long push’)
• Easy resizing of shapes and images by tapping them to select, then dragging one of eight directional handles and releasing
• High quality rendering of a wide range of filetypes, including Open Document Format, OOXML, and MS Office file formats (both binary and rich text format)
• One tap access to the on-screen keyboard for quickly switching between viewing and editing mode
• Smooth scrolling between pages

In addition to these, each component has its own distinct features.

Writer

• Document saving support, updating the originally opened file by default
• Support for movable embedded images, drawings, and shapes

https://youtu.be/3mkN8i85vrU

Calc

• Touch-triggered selections of table and spreadsheet cells flows across columns, rows, and pages with the drag of a finger.
• The “parts” sidebar switches between spreadsheets within the document

https://youtu.be/fWGMW1V8WYA

Draw

https://youtu.be/U7TbP9CSS90

Impress

• The “parts” sidebar shows a scrollable overview of all slides
• User interface interaction and overlays are now far more accurate

https://youtu.be/xdphYds9fYU

Under the hood

Powerful internals

The editor consists of two parts: LibreOffice core compiled for the Android platform, and a Java component that is responsible for the user interface. They interact with each other via LibreOfficeKit — a thin C++ library that allows any application to access LibreOffice’s powerful internals via a consistent interface.

All three parts (LibreOffice core, LibreOfficeKit, and the Android interface) have been extended to enable them to handle user-specified selections, cursor placement and movement, and commands like loading a document and applying formatting. The signals we’ve implemented make way for other LibreOffice-powered applications to support editing too.

Input and interface accuracy

• Highlighted text selections can include table contents, allowing for formatting of contents of multiple document sections simultaneously. Previously selections used different internal identification systems and had to be selected separately.
• All Impress interaction data has been ported to TWIPs — or ‘twentieth of an inch points’, from millimetre based measurements, resulting in much finer internal measurements, and improvements to display and selection for all versions of the application.

Performance

More efficient rendering of documents tiles: those relating to non-visible areas are deprioritised and rendered in the background without blocking the initial page view from loading. The result: faster loading of documents for the user and more efficient use of the mobile device’s resources.

Documentation

• We’ve added extensive javadoc/doxygen comments to pre-existing and updated methods
• We’ve included javadoc/doxygen comments for all new classes and methods

Reaching out

On the rare occasion that our engineers hands haven’t been busy under LibreOffice’s hood, they’ve been writing up their work in blogs and demonstrating it at conferences.

• At FOSDEM 2015 on January 31st, Miklos Vajna presented LibreOffice Viewer for Android, and posted his slides
• At FOSS ASIA on April 13th, Tomaž Vajngerl presented the latest Android editing features
• Throughout the development process, Miklos has also been blogging about his progress on tiled editing, input handling, selections, graphic handling, and formatting.

Joining in

This is the start of a journey that you can be part of — get involved with any number of ongoing LibreOffice activities, including LibreOffice for Android documentation, demonstration, and development.

• Unstable daily builds can be found here
• A user introduction is available on the Document Foundation Wiki
• A developer introduction is also available
• Report any problems you find to the bug tracker, and attach any documents related to the issue so developers can investigate

To complete this prototype preview we’d like to again thank The Document Foundation for making the work possible, and remind you that, as a charitable foundation, donations power their work. Support the foundation by donating via their website.

The post LibreOffice for Android: prototype editor preview appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

As part of our ongoing development of the separate LibreOffice editor app, user interface rendering has been overhauled ‘under the hood’, with the focus on faster and more accurate fetching of tiles (images which combine to form the visible Android interface).

Where scrolling complex documents used to lag, browsing is now smooth. Where occasional waiting for document sections was required, tiling now prioritises the most important sections, and renders them faster.

This work by Collabora Engineer Tomaž Vajngerl is critical for responsive editing in the LibreOffice editor project, which shares the same codebase as the Viewer application.

Today’s update is the latest of Collabora’s weekly Android updates.

The post Latest LibreOffice Viewer for Android Brings Faster, Smoother Reading appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.