Hi, so I'm Scarlett Gray, and Clapper Office can finally run on mobile Linux.
So I guess a bit of background may be necessary, so I've been to first in for a couple
years, and how many of you have been to first in before?
Okay, most of you, almost all of you, each year I've given a little bit of a presentation,
I work at Clapperer, so I make office software, and I specifically make mobile office
software, and up until this year, that's been on Android and iOS.
Here is a presentation I gave last year, the in-flight Wi-Fi is bad, but my presentation
is still good.
It was about Clapper Office on Android and iOS, and it was a great presentation, it
talked about how we had nice integration with mobile operating systems, I showed off present
from the phone, and after my talk, people came to me and they said, hey, Scarlett, that
was a great talk, but I use mobile Linux, can I use this?
I heard you do mobile stuff, and people have been, in fact, saying that to me last year,
the year before, I heard you do mobile stuff, can I use it on Linux, because though much
of the wider world is stuck in the Apple and Google ecosystems, here we have a lot of
people who really love mobile Linux, and it would be beautiful if we could get Clapper
Office running on that, a mobile optimized office suite on mobile Linux.
But there was no good way.
I had to tell them, no, not really, there was a GTK app, an app that is intended to work
similarly to the iOS and Android apps, but it's really only for debugging problems in
them, it's not great, it's required to be run via the command line, it's that's all
of the documentation, that is the whole of the documentation on the GTK app, it is intended
for development use only, it's not digital compile and it's not very good, but could
you run maybe in next cloud server on your phone, well kind of maybe, next have really
wants to be publicly accessible, if you do that then you're going to start having a complaint
that you're not provisioning certificates and giving it access to the wider world, it's
kind of a pain, next cloud is great, if you're running a server for lots of people to use
and share documents, it's not great if you're one person who wants to have office on their phone,
it's not designed for this, right, next cloud is great as solving the problem it solves,
it's terrible it's solving this, it's a bad idea, meanwhile back at cloud era, this is Michael
Meeks, he's my boss's boss, he says we have this really great online office suite,
wouldn't it be nice if our customers, people who used us, could get a consistent local UI,
wouldn't it be nice if they could on their desktop, have something that looked kind of like
clouder online, wouldn't it be nice if we had better system integration because
copian paste on web is actually quite painful to write code for, and so we came up with clouder
office desktop and we started writing this, these are some people who worked on it, there's
software up there and tour and candy and they started work on the mobile, on the desktop office suite for
Linux Mac and Windows and they were working on it based on the code that we already had for mobile,
can we take some of the same sort of ideas about how we integrate with this system and can we
bring it to desktop and actually there's a lot more people who who worked on it alongside them,
not full time but who contributed patches that helped or who did mobile work that went into it
and actually in fact the whole country of the community helped, right, because all of the code
that that's there is based on the web stuff that we have already and everyone who's contributed
to clouder and even liberal offices the whole has helped to make that better and more robust.
So it's based on your platform web view it takes the online bits that we have in clouder online
and it runs a server on your device with a separate communication layer that pretends to be a
web socket so that the online bits that we have still work but you don't need to run a full server
on your device and it runs on Linux so can we run it on mobile Linux? I have a couple of mobile
Linux firms one of them was given to me by Java and I got one of my own they are a platform and
a poker firm. I don't have an arm machine to build anything on and it's very very close to
CFP when this releases so I need to get something quick. I package a collaborative office for
next and I use some online next build service to get a first copy up and running and I have to
mess around and copy around different parts of the build afterwards it's a horrible process it's
terrible you should never use this but it works and this is a photo that I took around 30 minutes
before the CFP closed of me writing my CFP with a version of collaborative office running on a phone.
Thank you thank you I've got some problems right so here you can see the UI is still the
desktop UI and it's got a the document is probably locked and has been opened as read over here
it can't actually edit any of your files which is a little bit of a problem for an office suite.
So let's see what we can fix. Oh yeah that's that's the time that's 2325 on the
day the CFP closed it's it's quite late. Oh yeah yeah yeah more problems the new document page
is rather payable to you as you can see the templates are all cut off that you can kind of work
around this if you have if you have your phone in landscape mode but it's not great.
Okay let's see what we can fix. So this the document is locks and has been open read only that
that's completely fixed when we change the build process to build a flat pack that just went away.
This one this this is half fixed we have the UI we need to make sure that it shows on mobile
Linux right now a desktop is is hard coded so that it will show the desktop UI but we can
change it to be based on say your screen size and that will that will fix that one.
This one is a bit more a problem because we don't have the UI written so we need to
write some better UI for showing templates right now as I mentioned you can use this work around
where you have the your phone in landscape mode but it will would be nice to fix it.
We also need a way of detecting mobile Linux because if we don't have a way of detecting mobile
Linux then we don't know when to apply these automizations and and when to show you the the normal
desktop UI I don't have a good way of doing this. If you if you know something please tell me
we can look at the the kernel name that that's the thing I thought of because maybe you're using post
market OS and that's probably probably quite mobile coded um we also have things in our
web code to look and look at your screen size but that doesn't work in smaller windows so it will
be really nice if if any of you know a way to detect whether a device is mobile Linux please send
me a message send me an email scallid.grey at clover.com thanks okay but it lives it's usable
it lives we can present from it you can get it right now off of the store it could be better there's
lots of problems you can help please please help thank you