Johan Henselmans, 07-06-2007 11:49:
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.
The main issue with OOo at this point is that it is not so easy to customize the GUI. It have been an always present point on OOoCon the way we depend very much on absolute sizing and rigid layout. That's a point that bring us another issues, as word cutting for some localizations (Portuguese is one of the worst languages at this point and we got some issues even when testing newer versions).
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.
That would make OOo look less alien when compared to the other programs of the same operating system. Users of GNOME, for instance, would like to use the GTK look'n'fell and widgets everywhere. This looks like more important than to have the same thing on every place (and find it hard to find the preferred folders or having to learn how to use another widget only because of one program).
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.
No really... when Camino was created it made a lot from the scratch and some things there inside are major hacks. Firefox (truly, every new application built using the modern codebase from Mozilla) is getting more OS look'n'fell, even for OS X, and Camino can't benefit from that, because it still using the old codebase. But XUL has always been more customizable: with CSS, including a lot of specific properties for Mozilla; with XBL; and with more XUL (overlays). It would be nice to have an easy way to customize the OOo UI.
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.
Of course everyone would benefit from that. The Mac people could help everyone here ;). --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
