The Document Foundation recently assigned one of the packages of the Android tender to Igalia; in particular, the one about cloud storage and email sharing. Our proposal comprised the following tasks:

• Integrate the “share” feature of the Android framework to be able to send documents by email, bluetooth or any other means provided by the system.
• Provide the means for the community to develop integration of cloud storage solutions.
• Implement ownCloud integration as an example of how to integrate other cloud solutions.
• Extensive documentation of the process to integrate more cloud solutions.

The work is completed and the patches available in the repository; most of them are already merged in master, while ownCloud support lives in a different branch for now.

Sharing documents

The Android-provided share feature allows to send a document not only through email but through bluetooth or any available methods, depending on the software installed in your device.

We have made this feature available to users through a context menu in the document browser, which pops up after a long press on a document.

Support for cloud storage solutions

This task consisted of creating an interface to develop integration of any cloud storage solution. The first step was abstracting the code that made direct access to the file system, so it could be replaced by the different implementations of storage services, which from now on will be denominated document providers.

Afterwards, we created two document providers for local storage: one to access the internal storage of the device and another one to conveniently access the Documents directory inside the storage. These two simple providers served as a test for the UI to switch between both; we used the Android drawer widget, which pops-up with a swipe gesture from the left of the screen.

All the operations in the Android document browser were being performed in the same thread. Besides being suboptimal, the development framework actually forbids running network code in the main thread of the application. The next step for us was isolating the code that might need networking access when interacting with a cloud provider, and run it in separate threads.

ownCloud document provider

At that point, we had everything in place to write the code to access an ownCloud server. We did it with the help of an Android library provided by ownCloud developers.

There was still another task, though; any cloud service will likely need some configuration from the user for login credentials and so. We had to implement a preferences screen to enter these settings and do the proper wiring for the provider to be able to listen to any changes in them.

Documentation

To help other developers writing new document providers, we have tried to document the new code in detail, specially those interfaces that must be implemented to create new document providers. Besides, we will publish a document explaining how to extend the cloud storage integration here soon.

That’s all for now; to try the ownCloud provider you will have to build the feature/owncloud-provider-for-android branch yourself, while you will find the share feature in the packages already available in the Play Store or F-Droid. Hope you enjoy it!

Next week I’m flying to FOSDEM to let you know about our work in LibreOffice for Android, which has just been released in the Play Store. In my talk I will focus on the document browser, the new features we are currently working on and my own vision for the future of this component.

You can read more about LibreOffice for Android in this post from The Document Foundation, and some gory technical details in Michael Meeks’ blog.

EDIT: Slides! Find them here.

I’m borrowing the post title that Tomaž and Andrzej used before to talk about the work that I have lately been doing at Igalia regarding LibreOffice on Android.

You might know there are several projects living under android/experimental in our code tree; it is exciting to see that a new experiment for a document viewer that uses a fresh approach recently arrived to the party, which can be the basis for an Android editor. I was happy to add support to receive view or edit intents to the shiny new viewer, so we could open any document from other Android applications like file browsers.

Besides, android/experimental hid some very interesting work on an Android-centric document browser that could be a good starting point to implement a native Android wrapping UI to LibreOffice, although it had some problems that made it unusable. In particular, thumbnail generation was making the application crash – for that reason I’ve disabled it until we get a proper fix – and the code to open a document was broken. Fixing and working around these issues were the first steps to bring the document browser back to life.

I noticed that the browser was inconveniently dependent of the ActionBarSherlock library, which is not really necessary now we are targetting modern Android versions with out-of-the-box action bar support. I replaced Sherlock ActionBars with Android native ones, and that allowed to remove all the files from ABS library from our source tree.

I also took the freedom to reorganize the application resources (design definitions, bitmaps and so), removing duplicated ones. It was the preparation for the next task…

Finally, I merged the document browser project into the new viewer with this huge patch, so they can be built and installed together. I also did the modifications for the browser to open the documents using the new viewer, so they become one coherent, whole application.

Now both the viewer and the document browser can evolve together to become a true LibreOffice for Android, which I hope to see not too far away in the future.