Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Announcing the world's probably first OpenOffice Document Reader in the cloud!

Before you ask: yes, it renders LibreOffice documents just fine too, of course!

A few days ago Google released Google Drive and the according SDK, so I took the chance to be the first to integrate a OpenOffice / LibreOffice document viewer. After some turbulence and some tips from the very helpful Google Drive SDK team I eventually managed to get everything up and running. As usual, everything is very minimalistic and just works (most of the time).

Without any further ado, please welcome OpenOffice Document Reader for Google Drive. Download the extension at the Chrome Web Store and get started viewing your OpenDocument files from within Google Drive. :)

I've decided to remove support for images for the first version, because this would stress the server even further. Moreover, as you know if you're a user of the version for Android, we only support very basic formatting! Please keep that in mind.

Some technical stuff: this is the exact same code as the one used by OpenOffice Document Reader for Android! Thanks Andreas for your hard work!

One last thing: Although the server is able to render a 100+ document in a few seconds, I'm sure the server will eventually stop serving requests if more users are requesting to see their documents. So please don't try to open huge documents just for fun. ;) If you happen to experience outage either bear with it, or send a donation so we can keep the server up.

PS: If you have any suggestions for a better name, please tell me about them!
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6 comments:

  1. longcatJune 13, 2012 at 12:14 PM

    thanks... just what i was looking for - i was disappointed that google drive couldn't just open .odt files anyway,

    now i want to be able to search my .odt files in my google drive, surely your app could help their search?

    anyway, thanks again x

    ReplyDelete
  2. TomTascheJune 18, 2012 at 2:50 PM

    Google Drive doesn't allow to implement such a feature (at the moment?). Sorry!

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownSeptember 5, 2012 at 2:08 AM

    Hi, how can I get this extension? It's redirecting me back to the web store when I click on Launch App. I notice there are a couple of other people who are having this issue as well.

    Thanks. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. TomTascheSeptember 8, 2012 at 4:02 PM

      You have to click on a .odt or .ods file in Google Drive. Our app should launch automatically and display the selected document!

      Delete
  4. IanSeptember 19, 2012 at 10:34 AM

    Hello. This looks great. Do you know whether there are any plans to support it in Android?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. TomTascheSeptember 21, 2012 at 9:40 PM

      https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=at.tomtasche.reader

      ;)

      Otherwise you could simply use the official Google Drive Android app to open your documents and it will prompt you to use the version described in the blog post above.

      Delete

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