Zitat von Bruce D'Arcus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > - it's a big mistake to prioritize Java in OOo, when the existing > Python support is so lacking that people like Rob basically consider it > worthless (like, there's no use trying to use Python in OOo); OOo's > future success will depend on its support for Python, etc.
I'd be intersted to know why you think that, particularly, Python is so important for "OOo's future success". BTW. I just downloaded the new SDK and looked into the Developer's Guide. The Java support is neary as complicated as before. (The code to set up a small dialog, as in one example, takes one page. That's approximately three to four times the code to do the same thing with the Swing, AWT or SWT libraries. No way I'll do this! Has Rob already looked into the new SDK to check if Python support has improved? > - it's a somewhat lesser mistake to focus so much on copying Office. > OOo needs to be BETTER than Office, or people won't bother with it That's one point. The other is, that I fear they copy MSOffice's mistakes as well. As an example, the toolbar concept in OOo1.x was not optimal, but the one of MSOffice has other drawbacks, in my opinon. > The funny thing is, in trying to copy Office so closely, OOo developers > are trying hit a moving target. Yup. As an annotation. I am sure you have read the lines saying, Sun wants to concentrate on buisiness solutions for OOo3.0. To my ears this sounds EXACTLY like the way MS Office is heading: Provide collaboration solutions for business people, but ignore that there are fundamental problems that affect all users. To make it clear: Which business will use OOo, even with collaboration tools, if it is impossible to automatically align a formula in a line of text or create sophisticated (and good-looking) graphs ... and if there is no functional bibliographic database. But it doesn't surprise me too much. Sun sells StarOffice to business people. They do not get their money from the OOo downloaders, like scientists or pupils. Who can blame them for satisfying their paying customers first? > Get rid of the damned b and i toolbar buttons, and get serious > about character styles and mapping them to XML! Sorry to disagree here. Imagine a 70 year old grandma writing a letter to her son. Using "bold" and "italice" and selecting a font+size does the thing. I wonder how you would manage to tell that grandma to create a style for each formatting first - which takes at least twice the time. You get the picture? We need the "legacy funcions" while advancing further. Same applies to our project as well. OOoBib needs to support BOTH simple-minded people as well as those like us that need complex bibliographic function. > I asked about xforms support because I think this could be a really > good thing. I just played a bit with it on the beta candidate. It seems(!) to work in principle - it's like creating a web page. But it is painfully slow (with my installed version at least)! Besides that I would need a step-by-step tutorial to understand how exactly such an XForm works and how to make it evaluate complex forms. I admitt I don't have the knowledge (and time and interest) to do deeper tests. Maybe someone other can do that...? > Also, I think this emphasizes why we ought to rip out the current bib > support and make it fully plug-in based. Definitely! ... And make it a separate code base with as few dependencies on OOo Writer code as possible. Matthias Basler [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------- This mail was sent through http://webmail.uni-jena.de --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
