On 23/09/2011 15:28, Rob Weir wrote:
On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 2:39 AM, floris v<floris...@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not so sure that further differentiation between AOO and LO is such a
good idea. The Document Foundation with LO was started because some people
didn't trust Oracle. Now that the code base is being transferred to ASF, and
it looks like ASF is taking its responsibility for OOo seriously (from the
outsider's point of view), the need for a separate LO may disappear. There
is some concern that the community will split over the differences between
the two versions, and a big difference in the user interface won't make that
better. And if OOo users want to help LO users in the forums, that will be
easier the more the two programs resemble each other in look and feel.
From what I can see (and I see more than is public at this point) the
investment in AOOo is soon going to be greater than what is in LO.
These developers will not be very interested in sitting around,
When these developers are paid, they can start to tackle the most
annoying bugs, this will make (100% sure) aOOo better !
doing
nothing, moving no faster than what LO can do. It is natural, as AOOo
grows, for it to evolve quickly, bring more innovation, and leave
other forks behind. I don't think we can or should try to avoid this.
Of course, there are ways to reduce the pain of divergence. For
example, LO can take improvements from AOOo and merge them into LO.
The Apache license encourages this. LO could also end its fork, and
put their development effort on the AOOo project. They would be
welcome here, as long-lost brothers.
A very different reason to keep things as they are that it always takes time
to get used to a new UI. I _hate_ the most recent changes in the UI of most
browsers, that make finding the options screen almost impossible, and that
only because the designers wanted to get rid of the menu bar. We still work
with the qwerty keyboard, that has been designed to slow typists down, so I
can't find a good reason to change a working UI.
Good point. We don't want to make changes just because we can make
changes. We want a purpose. Many users spend hours each day in front
of their spreadsheets or word processor. They develop "muscle memory"
for every command keystroke, and play their word processor like a
piano. We don't want to upset that.
On the other hand, most of our potential users are using MS Office,
and they have radically changed their UI....
-Rob
Thank you,
Peter aka floris v
Op 22-9-2011 19:28, Guy Waterval schreef:
Hi all,
2011/9/21 Rob Weir<robw...@apache.org>
I don't want to distract us too much for the 3.4.0 work. There is a
lot of work to do, mainly around the detailed work of IP review.
However, I think we should have a parallel conversation, with project
contributors as well as with users, about what we could do after that,
in a major release.
Perhaps time is coming to try to change the interface. We've now two
projects LO and AOO which have the same look and it's perhaps not so good.
I
think a new look for AOO could give it a better identitiy and could be
more
attactive for the mass of the end users as the old one. But as I'm not a
coder, I don't know if this could be "easily" realisable.
Best regards
gw
