Re: Stop OpenOffice Renaissance project (petition)
Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 10:39 pm
yes, this has been pointed to out to them. So far I haven't seen a response about this from them.
User community support forum for Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice and all the OpenOffice.org derivatives
https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/
a) you can make money out of OOo downloads as long as your business is legally conducted in the country that hosts the web server. In fact, OOo is open source and not just always free. We can discuss the terms and conditions of the business, but surely not the business itself. In addition to this, the petition is not supporting that business. It should be clear what automatic ADS are;lgusaas wrote:Did any one notice this link on the petition webpage?It seems that the originator of the petition supports the cretins who try to make money for offering downloads of OO.o.Open Office Official Site
Create Word, Excel, Access & Powerpoint Latest Version
OpenOffice-Software.com
Here is a hugely better official proposal from IBM:acknak wrote:Get a grip. How is a petition going to help?
I'm not a big fan of the Renaissance process myself, but I can't see how petitions are going to lead to any improvements. What they're looking for is constructive criticism, or some better proposals. "I hate the ribbon" is not particularly helpful.
[url=http://www.mail-archive.com/users@openoffice.org/msg112384.html]In that mail[/url], Mathias Bauer wrote:Hi,
sorry for the long mail, but we already had too much incomplete and misunderstood communication, sometimes it is necessary to talk about the details. Please read carefully and try to understand what I think should be and is the motivation for a changed UI in OOo. Maybe then you will agree that the noise about "ribbon aping" is too much ado about nothing.
I think your "petition" is completely useless as it preaches to the converted. Nobody wants to or will just "copy" the ribbon interace.Tommy27 wrote:PETITION: http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/stoprenaissance/
Some OpenOffice developers announced, few time ago, a great (in their minds) project: Trying to copy ugly, unusable Ribbon interface, made by Micro$oft for Word and other Office products
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/prototyping_a_new_ui_july
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/prototyping_a_new_user_interface
This Ribbonized GUI has already several negative comments by Micro$oft users, so, why trying to copy a poor GUi instead to analyze and solve serious issues present in OpenOffice? (it has many serious issues)
if you Agree with me (and many other) please sign petition, so we can stop OpenOffice renaissance (or middle age?) not useful project, and developpers can avoid to stress and go to solve issues.
The petition has already collected 176 signatures. please, add yours
The blog entries you quoted are perfect examples for a complete misunderstanding, caused by a badly prepared presentation of a prototype, a communication that forget to tell about the background and by reactions from people that talk before finding out what they are talking about. Too many people commented the blog entries that neither understood what a prototype is nor what the particular prototype in question wants to show. Many other people read these comments and even without having a look on the prototype parotted "OOo wants to copy the ribbon"! Rubbish.
So what's the fuss all about?
OOo will never "copy" the ribbon, that would be aping the look without caring for the ideas and working style behind it and if this is what we want. Our starting point is how we want our users to operate OOo.
Whatever will come out of this: as all Office applications have something in common it is not surprising that their UI concepts will have some similarities. So don't think that an apple is an orange just because their look has something in common if you look at them from a distance.
What we are trying to achieve is a context sensitive user interface. With an important limitation: context sensitivity is wanted for toolbars, not for menus. From what I know it is common sense that our menus will stay in the new UI and they won't be "context sensitive" (like in the different rather lame attempts from Microsoft with "personalized" menus etc.). That alone is a major difference to the Office 2007 UI that makes OOo much better.
Menus are a tool for browsing through the functionality of an application and rearrangig the menu elements is counter productive. But for other UI elements, especially those that consume more screen space, it is a useful concept to reduce clutter.
This is neither new nor is it invented by Microsoft and especially the "ribbon" is not the only way to implement it.
In fact OOo 1.x had a lot of context sensitivity in its user interface, but it was implemented in a rather unintuitive way, and so many people couldn't cope with it. The result was the UI change in OOo 2.0: many toolbars that automatically pop up when it appeared that they could be used. IMHO this was a huge step back in terms of usability and I'm glad that our UX people want to correct that error. The number of complaints about this toolbar mess is pretty huge, so it's necessary to do something against it.
You can't show all possible buttons at once, this consumes too much screen real estate, you have to select some. Without context sensitivity you could get a "lean" interface with the absolut minimum of toolbars shown. Users then have to add and remove toolbars manually when they need them.
But users shouldn't be forced to do that, if the program is able to find the usable toolbars (and OOo is), it should help the user. This is the basic idea of context sensitivity: if e.g. a user has selected a picture, it doesn't make sense to waste precious screen space with a text formatting toolbar (that for a good reason is visible by default in all rich text applications), it should be replaced by a toolbar with buttons offering functionality that can be applied to the selected picture. So far, so good.
But even with this preselection of toolbars there are still too much toolbars in some situations. Consider the case of a user editing a list in a table cell. Here it might be possible to either work on the text attributes, the list attributes or the cell or table attributes. Showing toolbars for all of them all will create the toolbar mess whe currently have in OOo. Showing only one of them will create another problem: which of them might suits the user best is pure speculation. So the program must select one by educated guessing, but it's essential to allow user invervention to overrule this decision.
In OOo 1.x we showed the table toolbar by default in that situation, but we had a small blue triangle at the right end of the toolbar where the user could "rotate" the toolbar content between the three possible sets (text, list, table). As a "special service" the last selected set was remembered and restored in case the user again entered this context.
Admittedly that's not a very intuitive user interface, mainly because the blue triangle didn't tell what it was meant to to. But the idea in general was a good one (IMHO). It's better than the current situation where you either have to keep all three toolbars open evertime you are working in a table or always switching toolbars on and off manually (as in Word prior to Word 2007).
So for me the basic idea behind the OOo prototype is: only show toolbars that make sense in a particular context; if more of them might make sense, find a simple and intuitive way to switch between them.
In a certain way the MS Office ribbon amongst other concepts also implements this idea. So even without copying it it's very probable that whatever we implement will have some similarities with it. If someone presents another way to also implement the idea of context sensitivity with user intervention, that doesn't make this a "copy" of the ribbon, in the same way as e.g. the Gnome File Picker isn't a "copy" of the Windows File Picker, they are just different, though unvoidable somewhat similar implementations of the same idea (selecting files in a hierarchical file system).
So, please cool down and think about the concept that shall be implemented, not how it looks in a prototype that is barely more than a fake.
We should concentrate on which contexts we want to have, which toolbars they should get assigned to, which buttons should be in the toolbars, how the switching between different button sets can be implemented with as less screen space consumption as possible but as understandable and intuitive as possible. And if the result has some similarity with parts of MS's ribbon implementation - so what?
Other interesting questions are how big the buttons should be, if we should show symbols or texts or both etc. Much more interesting than diccussing how similar something looks to ribbons or not.
Additionally, let's discuss if the old toolbars should be used as an alternative UI. Possibly people prefer a mediocre UI just because they are used to it - that's a valid decision and IMHO shouldn't be ignored. Especially as at the moment, where nothing except the prototype has been implemented, it should be easy to plan for this.
Regards,
Mathias
--
Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer
OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS
I was talking about some people that used to post on the dot before registration was needed, and some others that still fire hard critics without knowing that the particular feature they ask for already exists or is being implemented for the next mayor release (I suspect that both groups are formed by the same people...). The particular kind that really deserves the Troll tag. I don't consider people that think different as trolls, I consider that some people that presume to think different behave as trolls: there is a differenceTommy wrote:i don't understand why some people consider othe people "trolls" just because they don't have the same ideas
Well, I've tested the prototype that was released and for which it was asked feedback. I couldn't do anything more, could I?Bill wrote:Your example is based on a not-fully-functional prototype, not a final product. I don't know how OOo would work around this, but in Office 2007, the GUI elements can be resized if they cover a relevant part of the document.
You can do so in a dual monitor configuration or with a really large display. Otherwise, IMO, you lose too much displaying area by not maximizing your document window to make room for the floating windows. However, I really like them and I'd let them in any new version anyway, expecially because you can dock them.Bill wrote:When I do use the Navigator or Stylist, they're outside my working window. They don't cover the working document.
I'm discussing about the actual OOo UI prototype, OK?Bill wrote:I don't understand. Why would a "task-oriented" Ribbon-like bar or app produce results difficult to modify? The result from using a "task-oriented" Ribbon-like bar should be exactly the same as the result from using a "Stylist-oriented" bar. The difference is the path taken, not the destination. Are you implying that the "task-oriented" bar results in direct formatting while a "Stylist-oriented" bar results in formatting using styles? Either UI should be able to produce either type of formatting. It's up to the user to determine whether to use styles or direct formatting.
What is the petition goal? Stop any change in the UI until bugs are fixed? Stop any change in the UI ever? Stop changing to a ribbon-like UI? It's not clear to me what the goal is.Tommy wrote:Deebo said:
consider the petition a "mean of pressure". You ask 100 to get 50.
i have the same opinion about the petition goal.
Renaissance developers should feel that a lot of users are against their project.
by the way, the petition count is now 216
OOo without styles? Inconceivable.deebo wrote:I'm discussing about the actual OOo UI prototype, OK?
In the current 0.16 version, nothing let me think that the task-oriented bar can produce a document based on styles.
What you call a "patchwork of styles" is direct formatting, not styles. A newbie might not even know what styles are, much less how to use them. IMO, the presence of the Stylist icon on the toolbar probably wouldn't make any difference for a newbie if no one trained the newbie how to use it. The petition condemns Project Renaissance for copying the "unusable' MS ribbon. I'd never used an application with the ribbon, but after reading that, I started using a trial version of Word 2007 to find out for myself. For me, the ribbon is far from unusable. Styles are even more prominent on the ribbon in Word 2007 than in the current OOo Writer UI.deebo wrote:Everything is contextual: selection of an object/page -> application of one or more attributes.
Of course, since the stylist has not been activated, it may be different in the final release, but I cannot foresee what is still in the developers' mind. I can comment what appears in the present prototype version, nothing more. And I don't see the "double path" that you wisely propose.
Indeed, with a lot of huge icons that suggest to a newbie user to apply contextual attributes to characters, paragraphs and pages, and without an icon for the Stylist or the Navigator, I think it's more likely a behavior like this from such an user:
a) to apply the desired attributes to the context object via the huge icons (i.e. italics, bold and a double line spacing to a paragraph)
b) to look for a tool like a "copying brush" to copy those contextual attributes elsewhere in the document or in other documents
rather than creating the style in the Stylist and then applying it to the document.
Those approaches seem very similar, but the former may cause a "patchwork of styles" in a document...
Ok. let me sat that I did not write the initial text of the petition. O have just promoted it here and in other forums.Bill wrote:What is the petition goal? Stop any change in the UI until bugs are fixed? Stop any change in the UI ever? Stop changing to a ribbon-like UI? It's not clear to me what the goal is.
Those guys don't decide anything.andyqkw wrote:This Renaissance Project is still heavily work in progress, wait for the next few prototypes to be our first before you guys decide...
I'm lost. You want to stop them with a petition and you're waiting for some action from them?Tommy wrote:many alternatives have been suggested to Renaissance-devs:
[...]
now i'm waiting some action from them and see what can tehy do in the next prototype (if ever there will be another one)
You're right, don't really understand why they're so against the idea of changes???Villeroy wrote:Those guys don't decide anything.
You are making noise in wrong place, here only users help users, not so much developers reading these posts.I wanna stop the current project direction
Because, instead you and all Ribbon-lovers (micro$oft fans) we work with OpenOffice and we want still work, not only Open-Look-and-quitandyqkw wrote:You're right, don't really understand why they're so against the idea of changes???
Please stop that. Haven't you read the posts in this thread (and the other one) and the replies from Mathias Bauer? He has posted a lot about that Renaissance project in the thread I've linked above.Dingo-Dog wrote:you and all Ribbon-lovers (micro$oft fans)