Major Release LibreOffice 4.4 Announced
The Document Foundation today announced the latest and "most beautiful" LibreOffice ever. LibreOffice 4.4 is the ninth major release for the project and brings with it lots of design and functionality improvements. Redesigned toolbars, menus, status bars, rulers and new theme selector are among the goodies for users. Michael Meeks said today that this release not only improves the visible features but also the foundations underneath.
LibreOffice 4.4 was announced this morning by the Document Foundation saying, "LibreOffice 4.4 has got a lot of UX and design love, and in my opinion is the most beautiful ever." Jan Holesovsky, leader of the design team, in the announcement summarized the changes:
We have completed the dialog conversion, redesigned menu bars, context menus, toolbars, status bars and rulers to make them much more useful. The Sifr monochrome icon theme is extended and now the default on OS X. We also developed a new Color Selector, improved the Sidebar to integrate more smoothly with menus, and reworked many user interface details to follow today’s UX trends.
Other improvements included new Master Document templates and Writer Shapes can now have a textbox. The Style dropdown now has a new split menu offering edits and updates. AutoCorrect now fixes all instances of a misspelling with the first correction as well as a lot of other tweaking. OpenGL was enabled for Windows versions and improved in Linux and Apple versions. Math now supports colors inserted from the Elements bar and Impress can let users save documents in read-only with a password. New Caladea and Carlito fonts were added and reports have confirmed that Japanese input is working this release as well. A new browser/selector was added this release for Firefox themes and theme support was expanded to include the bottom toolbars as well. Lots of tweaking under the hood should net better performance too.
Michael Meeks posted of the improved code quality today saying, "We now have a defect density that bumps along close to 0.00, though as Coverity introduces new checks, and new code gets committed that goes up and down a little; currently 0.02 so - 2 static checking warnings per 100,000 lines. That compares extremely well with the average Open Source project which has 65 warnings per 100,000 lines." Meeks gives props to the QA team for their "amazing work" in bringing down the "un-triaged bug count." Lots of code cleanup occurred as well as usual making LibreOffice 4.4 the best release ever.
Download your fresh copy from www.libreoffice.org or The Document Foundation.