> Also take many dialogs in Linux GUI - it is pain to see screen real > estate wasted for space between controls and at the same time not be > able to fit in 800x600. Compare that to OO - nicely designed GUI (with > the room to improve), pleasing eye and making user comfortable.
That is probably a personal preference issue. I personally don't think that OOo's GUI is all that crash-hot. Maybe I'm behind with a few revisions but I find the contect sensitive pop-up windows (which usually pop up at the most inconvenient place) and toolbars extremely annoying; not to mention the fact that most control dialogs are modal. I expect a window (and toolbar) to stay where I put it, close only when I tell it to close and if it can't have a function, make its widgets inactive. I don't want the program decide about my screen estate because it has no idea what else I have on the screen, what my personal preferences are and on what and how I work in general. If I open a dialog and want to go back to the main window because before entering information into the dialog I want to check something in the document, I expect the dialog to stay there and wait patiently while I come back to it - but OOo forces me to abort the dialog (which then forgets everything I've entered so far), look up what I want, open the dialog again and start it from scratch. If I want to do the same thing twice I need to open and fill the dialog twice, instead of the dialog sitting there all the time and me just clicking on Apply twice. I heard that that (i.e. the modal dialog and alike) is the standard behaviour in Word and on Windows in general but that does not mean that that's the most efficient or comfortable. It may simply mean that that's the most familiar behaviour to most of the people (for they've never seen any better) or simplest to implement. Once you've worked with something in which each window lives its own independent life and all windows belonging to the application co-operate in the background to serve (but never to control!) your work, you will find OOo's GUI fairly restrictive. It's not OOo bashing, it's a great program and all, but I believe that its striving to give the "familiar MS Word experience" to its users costs a lot in usability. Zoltan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
