On 6/7/07, Mox Soini <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Quote from the review (linked below): ** The progress that's been made is encouraging, and I hope the team will soon be at a ** place where some of the Apple community's fantastic interface designers can start ** flexing their muscles to really make this port stand above the *nix & Windows versions ** for usability and beauty. I know there are lots of professional designers among users of Apple machines. What is OpenOffice.org's message going to be to those graphics and design people, who are not coders, but still would like to participate? (1) Something like: "Sorry you cannot do anything. OpenOffice.org wants the OOo Aqua to be like Windows OOo, with the exception of shiny blue buttons, of course" ? Or: "Well, you can re-design 600(!) icons that we have, but don't touch the UI in any other way" ? (1) Yes, there is the ux.openoffice.org and mailings lists and wiki. But that infrastructure is not relevant if no platfrom specific UI-level changes are not allowed to OOo.
That is the problem with cross-platform applications, it is then very hard not to get a design-by-committee look-and-feel. I have struggled with Eclipse the last weeks because of this. The user interface is a bizarre mix of Motif and Windows, with far too many icons and contextual menus crammed in all the wrong places. Using more system-specific functions (filepicker, print-selector, copy and paste, text-editing, image-editing) will give OpenOffice a nicer feel already. Look at neo: all that kind of stuff has been incorporated, and it makes the app a lot nicer to use in a specific environment. But look at the Camino and Firefox. Apparently, from the same codebase, it is possible to get an OS-look and feel. I also remember that in java, there has been the possibility to leverage system-specific look and feel for a long time, at least since JDK1.4. I think that one should leverage the knowledge of UI designers to come up with better dialogs, wizards, and layouts of functions, and get these people to give their talents to the overall design of OpenOffice. An example: try to explain to and enduser how to make labels with the label-wizard from a database or spreadsheet. Now try to do the same in Word. It takes less steps and is far more comprehensible. Some extra help over there would be very nice. If one could only make mockups of what one should expect! On 6/7/07, Shaun McDonald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi all, > > The subject says it all. The next 3 parts are still to come. > > <http://gregkefalas.com/index.php/2007/06/07/openoffice-mac-port- > developer-preview-in-depth-part-i-introduction-and-summary/> > > Shaun > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-- Best Regards, Johan Henselmans
