Phillip Rhodes schreef op 08-09-2016 22:18:
So anyway, just wanted to seed this discussion and hopefully provoke
some
serious thinking around this. Let's think hard about what we want to
be so
that
we can easily say "Why develop/use AOO instead of X?" type questions.
I just wanted to take this opportunity to voice my ideas again ;-).
I will keep it short this time.
I am a user who is disgrunted by both the features and stability of
LibreOffice and probably also OpenOffice, since many features are the
same. One important feature for me is a GOOD undo facility and both
products don't have it, because they don't store, or merge, block level
undo's resulting from typing. In mostly any editor I can go infinitely
into the past as I undo stuff but in OO and LO it is limited to a few
sentences at most.
Last time this happened I swore to never use LO again and started using
Google Docs.
The only reason I am not using Microsoft Office (365) now is that there
is no Linux variant of it.
Given these flaws and failings for me (and sometimes LO just crashes and
takes your work with you and it is unrecoverable) and given the fact
that I think OO looks outdated (on Linux), I would have ventured in the
past that these were the most important things for me:
* I do not want to be exclusively dependent on the ODT format editors
anymore
- In Windows I have much better fonts available (or more of them) than
in Linux
- Even Google Docs just has much better fonts than Linux and it even has
the Linux fonts, so there you ahve that.
* I would like AOO (or anything) to be a glue between the platforms.
Cloud is becoming very important or is already so. Being able to
reference documents on Google Drive can be important. Being able to
reference documents on Microsoft OneDrive can be important.
- Google Docs natively saves.. or ehm, downloads, documents in .docx,
but can also process .odt, I believe. So in order to stay relevant you
must focus, for instance, on perfect interoperability between AOO and
the .docx that result from Google Docs.
- Since there is no Microsoft Office client on Linux, and neither do
they have an online editor, it becomes product to become that client to
Microsoft OneDrive that can also edit or save in .docx format. Now there
are a few meagre solutions for using OneDrive on Linux, but it is not
much.
Suppose AOO had its own OneDrive client plugin? That you could use AOO
to browse and modify, load and save, documents on OneDrive?
Just the same as that Microsoft Office would do, is what I mean. Just
become cloud-ready. Just allow a person to save on OneDrive.
* Fix the OpenOffice looks (at least on Linux). That black hard shadow
behind the "page" is not good enough anymore. Make sure it looks nice
enough and start with that thick black border.
Google Docs works awesomely if a bit slow (due to the internet
connection) and you can't do everything you can do in a regular editor
(particularly positioning and such things) (and you can only choose a
few font sizes) but in general (apart from not being able to actually
manually really save stuff) the editing experience is much nice than
either OpenOffice or LibreOffice. And it's just a new product, right.
It's not perfect but looks much better than anything else I've seen and
you don't run the risk of losing your content, that I constantly have
with LibreOffice/OO.
I have probably lost important court battles due to LibreOffice.
So I will say 3 things:
- fix the looks
- interoperate with OneDrive and Google Drive if possible (OneDrive more
important) and ensure perfect compability with these formats
- focus less on your own prominence as a True Alternative and become a
slave, so to say, to the document formats used by the Big Two, (which
are .docx and .odt) and just make sure your program can use these
formats AND interface with the cloud storage that they use.
Then if you've got that settled you can eventually maybe migrate or move
to your own cloud platform or provider or choice of providers so that
you become like an IMAP client to IMAP servers, even being capable to
copy documents in between, etc. Become the IMAP client for documents.
That's what I will say: become the IMAP "mail" client for documents,
that can interface with various cloud platforms as you edit locally but
can also save remotely.
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