LibreOffice Coming To iOS, Android & The Web

The LibreOffice media team has passed along some new information about what was revealed at this week's LibreOffice conference. At the Paris conference, experimental versions of LibreOffice for iOS, Android, and for web-browsers were revealed.

The 2011 LibreOffice Conference began on the 12th of October and is running through tomorrow (15 October) in Paris, France. The key announcements by The Document Foundation was a LibreOffice porting project to Android and iOS by a SUSE Finnish developer who was previously responsible for porting GIMP to Windows. The Document Foundation is looking forward to bringing their open-source office suite to iPads and Android tablets. New user-interface work will be done for these smaller, portable devices.

Michael Meeks has also been working on a "LibreOffice Online" prototype, which will allow the office suite to be used from HTML5 web-browsers. What's interesting is that this web-based version of OpenOffice is using the GTK+ 3.2 Broadway back-end, which allows the GTK interface to be rendered in the web-browser using the HTML5 Canvas and other new web standards. There's a WebM video for those interested.

While this is some exciting work for this OpenOffice.org fork, the iOS/Android ports and web-based versions of LibreOffice won't be ready until late 2012 or early 2013. These details were also published to The Document Foundation blog.