LibreOffice is one or several applications?

[Jesús Corrius]

Hi guys,

Right now LibreOffice works as a single application on Windows 7 and
higher. That means the system doesn't know and/or care if you are creating
a spreadsheet or a presentation, you are just running LibreOffice all the
time.

Identifying the different components of LibreOffice as "different
applications" has its advantages. For example:

1. Now all the LibreOffice windows are grouped together in the Windows task
bar. With different applications you could have the windows grouped by
component: 3 calc windows, 1 writer window and 2 impress windows.

2. With different applications you could have specific features for each
component when they are docked in the taskbar. Right click on Impress icon
 -> "Create new presentation". Right click on Calc icon -> "Create new
spreadsheet", etc.

3. With different application you could have "recent files" per component
on the Windows 7 start menu. So for example, under the Writer icon, you'll
find only the recent Writer documents.

The main advantages of keeping LibreOffice as a single application is that
we don't have to do anything (well, except a couple of commits waiting for
review on gerrit ;)) which at the time were necessary to make all
StarOffice derivatives play nice together on Windows.

Many of the bits necessary to make this separation possible are already in
the source code, but it's not complete. The main remaining things are:

1. Add extended attributes (KindMap related) to the launcher icons during
installation.

2. Change the thread Application User Model ID when launching a new
component from inside LibO.

3. Update the taskbar icon when launching a new component from inside LibO.

4. Send the recent saved / opened document to the proper Application User
Model ID in the filepicker.

In any case, the important question here is: "Should LibreOffice remain a
single application on Windows or act as different applications?". As you
can see, the user experience on Windows can change quite a lot.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers,

-- 
Jesús Corrius <jesus at softcatala.org>
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