André Wyrwa wrote:
No we don't. Mozilla is doing sufficient work in that area and we don't
need to re-invent the wheel. All we need to do is integrate with
Mozilla products wherever possible.
Tight integration - like download them at the same time tight. And
Thunderbird needs a lot of work, from what I hear. (I use Gmail online, so
what do I know about a mail client?)
That's a distribution topic, not a development one. What can you make
better in Thunderbird in terms of integration with OOo components? Well,
you could have a database or calc file (database is better) with your
contacts and you could use Writer to create your mail bodies. But what
for? In MS-Office i always disabled the "use Word to edit emails"
option. Yes, Thunderbird needs a lot of work, but it is on the other
hand quite a good emailer already. And do you think it would need less
work to create just another one from scratch? I'd rather go the improve
Thunderbird way. Everything else really is a distribution issue.
I fall in between these two positions. I would love to see OOo be able
to integrate very tightly with Thunderbird if the user chose. For that
matter, what I'd REALLY like to see is OOo be able to integrate with
whatever email client the user wanted. It would be like getting MS
Office, but if you hated Outlook the way I do, you could simply swap it
out for Thunderbird. Of course, this is more or less a
never-to-be-fulfilled fantasy because the folks writing the various
email clients would have to all modify their work to standardize with
OOo's requirements and that's very unlikely. (Actually, now that I think
about it, there may be solutions on the OOo side of this to make the
exchange relatively easy. Hmmm...)
Why is DTP outside of an office suite? You don't make flyers in an office?
I make them all the time - and bulletins, and posters, and newsletters....
DTP is big, and should be included in an office suite. People say Draw is
good for this - not in my experience, but YMMV.
You really don't want to have your avarage corporate content provider
create the prepress for your flyers. It goes through the fingers of a
graphics designer anyway.
But i actually do agree that DTP is big. Much bigger than word
processing. In fact, word processing is a desease, in my opinion. As
some good article i read not too long ago, pointed out, you either need
a text editor to create content that doesn't need layout or you need to
create a layouted/formatted document and hence a DTP application. That's
why I'm saying, make Writer more of a DTP application. Trash the whole
word processing metaphor. Word processors are unusable. MS is trying to
solve this by UI changes now, but it will only help them so far. OOo has
potential to solve it by taking the style metaphor further than MS, but
still doesn't go far enough. See further below...
To a certain extent I agree with this, but the long and short of it is
that there is a place for both. Ever tried writing a novel in PageMaker
or InDesign? It's no more fun doing that than it is to lay out a
magazine in Writer or Word. There is a place for both, and I think that
a DTP application is a logical next step for the OOo project, but not
until the existing components (such as Base) are more or less perfected.
(Most of the components are close, but some--like Base--still have
issues that need to be a priority.)
And Scribus, although they say they are "native" in 3 major platforms -
Windows, Mac, and Linux - they have some weird dependency issues that
really
should be included in the installer, instead of making users download 10
different things and stick them in different places on the computer. And
the Windows port is still beta.
What are these dependencies? For my windows install i only needed
Ghostscript. Well, yes, could be integrated into the installer.
Distribution issue.
I've never been satisfied with Scribus. It doesn't come close to the
capabilities of more proprietary packages like InDesign, Quark, etc.
It's more comparable with something like Serif PagePlus. If OOo were to
ever start a DTP project, I would hope that it would aim higher than
Scribus.
So, back to topic: Is web creation really business for an Office Suite
at current state? Look at a random business. Do they produce their web
pages in Frontpage? Or do they rather have a Typo3, Contenido or
whatever setup on their web servers and have someone transfer the
content from Word documents to the CMS? Corporate web sites are created
by web designers/developers, using web development tools. Not by Office
users. (And no - Dreamweaver/GoLive and Frontpage/NVU are not the same
types of program - the first are so to say the DTP applications for the
web, the latter are the word processors for the web - that's why
Frontpage is basically dead).
Honestly, a lot of businesses do have someone in their office do their
website. Should they? Well, that depends. I have seen some very nice
websites done by people in their office using something like Frontpage.
They are few and far between, but they do exist, and if you are a very
small business, you do what you can with what you've got. Writer does,
of course, have some extremely limited HTML capabilities, but it's by no
means a web client. That said, I think previous comments about N|vu are
correct. I see the same solution for a website creation tool as I do for
an email client and calendar: try to integrate with other projects.
Problem here is the different environments:
- QT (Scribus)
- GTK/GNOME (GIMP, Evolution, etc.)
- XUL (Mozilla)
- OOo Bridge (OOo)
- wxWindows (...)
Basically, they are all cross-platform or on the way there. XUL and OOo
are just the ones that are the most successful at current state.
That's my understanding as well.
Did you ever think about how sick the whole "place anchor for picture"
thing in Word Processors is? It's UI horror. Really. I'm placing a
picture. I'm placing it where i place it. Right there. What's that whole
anchor thing? In my company the big majority of people doesn't even get
that the text in their word documents jumps around weirdly when they
move a picture just a slight bit, because suddenly the anchor has jumped
to the next paragraph. It's horror! And it's conceptual, not
implementational - although OOo's implementation helps it heaps.
It depends on your purpose. I mean, Framemaker is essentially a huge
word processor, and it's great for technical projects in which you need
an illustration to stay with your specific chunk of text. In fact, I'd
love to see OOo have all of the capabilities of FM without the really
heady structuring. (How cool would it be to be able to place
illustrations and references to illustrations that all autonumber? Or to
be able to refer to Illustration X on Page Y and have X and Y change
according to where the text flow put the illustration?)
--
Steven Shelton
Twilight Media & Design
www.TwilightMD.com
www.GLOAMING.us
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