What a lousy program
Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2014 2:11 am
Of course there is no real way to communicate with the "team" responsible for the program (unless you are a programmer yourself) since open source developers generally do not offer any kind of customer/user communication channel.
Which is the main reason I try to stay away from OSS software unless it is commercial.
That is, when it is being developed for users instead of for developers.
So I install the full OpenOffice package. It asks me to supply a name and initials. Okay, I can do that.
Then it asks me to supply or create a database. Pardon, I do not even intend to use any DB functionality. Why can I not skip this?
So I give up on trying to open "OpenOffice Base" and instead open "Writer" instead. It opens.
[Why did I try to open "Base"? Because that is what appeared in the Win7 start menu of recently installed programs - I assumed it was the 'container' application for the whole suite; nowhere did it inform me that I was running a database application...]
But its default window/toolbar configuration is deeply flawed. Practically ever element is featured twice: once in a toolbar and once in the sidebar. I disable one of the toolbars and immediately there is more harmony. Now I need to get rid of the sidebar. The sidebar itself features no way to disable it. I try and try and try but to no avail. Eventually I discover that there is actually a menu item to do it. I play around just a little longer, and then the program crashes.
The program restarts and then tries to "recover" my empty document. I am forced to suffer meaningless dialogs and steps that never, in all my previous usage of this program, seemed to make any sense anyway. And I have not even typed a single word or letter.
Seriously people... is this the best the "free world" can do? I know I am not speaking to any "developer" here or any other person officially (does such a thing exist?) involved with this application. But anyone who has been around for a while will know that this program has not improved at all in these respects in the last 10 years or so.
And you can pretend that voices of "complaint" have no place on this forum, but where exactly can a disgruntled user go instead? If we cannot reach developers, at least we can reach each other.
At least I hope the program will stop crashing now (it always crashed on me in the past, for instance when right clicking on a spell-checked word). I would use Wordpad if only Microsoft hadn't gone haywire with all their UI "improvements". The old Windows XP Wordpad won't do anymore though. At least the "Writer" I have now looks okay.
But I'm still going to uninstall this bloody mess and just write my letters in HTML again using BlueGriffon and print them using Firefox, no matter how buggy and inconvenient. It beats having to face a program where the user interface is just a random occurrence that has not seen any good thought for a long time....
I seriously hope we will one day see a good community word processor and I seriously don't know what alternative there is nowadays to the Microsoft junk, I bet the only recourse is to go online and use web applications. I hate that. I'd use Evernote but it's not really meant for that and I wonder how it is going to print. So I'll just resort to HTML authoring for now..
Maybe for all time? Don't know.
Any case, I wish you all Godspeed in navigating this application you are using... but I require excellent expression in my use of language and my creation of documents when they are meant to convey a precise message, and I require tools that allow me to feel completely comfortable when I craft these messages. Such inferior user interface design as this program suffers (as well as the convoluted designs of modern corporations such as Microsoft) stand in stark opposition to what is natural and pleasant. By convoluted I mean that they introduce interface design principles that have no basis in real human experience in an effort to improve on things that do not need improvement. Microsoft's "ribbon" design is a horror to me. The basic model of drop-down-menus and popup-context-menus has served computing in a perfect way for a long time. But they thought they needed to change that. The horror. Seriously. And designers still make these huge interface design flaws.
Still yesterday (or was it today?) I was test-driving a replacement for the Windows Explorer. It is called "XYplorer". It features a tree view with a dual pane directory contents listing that also features tabs on each pane. There were so many flaws that I just purchased the program, wrote some improvement suggestions/advice, emailed the developers, and I won't even be using that program. Not for the time being. But I have high hopes for its future development, so I still wanted to contribute some money.
But in terms of word processors? I do not know where to go.
I recently started using the GIMP too. It has a seriously steep learning curve, and very little is intuitive... but at least once you learn the ropes it is an okay program. I do not like the multi-window setup at all - it requires me to minimize all other open applications so they don't clutter the background in between the open space between the windows. But it's doable and workable. I've been trying to improve my application toolset as of late. Will still take a while before everything is really properly functional.
But hey, we still have time.
Which is the main reason I try to stay away from OSS software unless it is commercial.
That is, when it is being developed for users instead of for developers.
So I install the full OpenOffice package. It asks me to supply a name and initials. Okay, I can do that.
Then it asks me to supply or create a database. Pardon, I do not even intend to use any DB functionality. Why can I not skip this?
So I give up on trying to open "OpenOffice Base" and instead open "Writer" instead. It opens.
[Why did I try to open "Base"? Because that is what appeared in the Win7 start menu of recently installed programs - I assumed it was the 'container' application for the whole suite; nowhere did it inform me that I was running a database application...]
But its default window/toolbar configuration is deeply flawed. Practically ever element is featured twice: once in a toolbar and once in the sidebar. I disable one of the toolbars and immediately there is more harmony. Now I need to get rid of the sidebar. The sidebar itself features no way to disable it. I try and try and try but to no avail. Eventually I discover that there is actually a menu item to do it. I play around just a little longer, and then the program crashes.
The program restarts and then tries to "recover" my empty document. I am forced to suffer meaningless dialogs and steps that never, in all my previous usage of this program, seemed to make any sense anyway. And I have not even typed a single word or letter.
Seriously people... is this the best the "free world" can do? I know I am not speaking to any "developer" here or any other person officially (does such a thing exist?) involved with this application. But anyone who has been around for a while will know that this program has not improved at all in these respects in the last 10 years or so.
And you can pretend that voices of "complaint" have no place on this forum, but where exactly can a disgruntled user go instead? If we cannot reach developers, at least we can reach each other.
At least I hope the program will stop crashing now (it always crashed on me in the past, for instance when right clicking on a spell-checked word). I would use Wordpad if only Microsoft hadn't gone haywire with all their UI "improvements". The old Windows XP Wordpad won't do anymore though. At least the "Writer" I have now looks okay.
But I'm still going to uninstall this bloody mess and just write my letters in HTML again using BlueGriffon and print them using Firefox, no matter how buggy and inconvenient. It beats having to face a program where the user interface is just a random occurrence that has not seen any good thought for a long time....
I seriously hope we will one day see a good community word processor and I seriously don't know what alternative there is nowadays to the Microsoft junk, I bet the only recourse is to go online and use web applications. I hate that. I'd use Evernote but it's not really meant for that and I wonder how it is going to print. So I'll just resort to HTML authoring for now..
Maybe for all time? Don't know.
Any case, I wish you all Godspeed in navigating this application you are using... but I require excellent expression in my use of language and my creation of documents when they are meant to convey a precise message, and I require tools that allow me to feel completely comfortable when I craft these messages. Such inferior user interface design as this program suffers (as well as the convoluted designs of modern corporations such as Microsoft) stand in stark opposition to what is natural and pleasant. By convoluted I mean that they introduce interface design principles that have no basis in real human experience in an effort to improve on things that do not need improvement. Microsoft's "ribbon" design is a horror to me. The basic model of drop-down-menus and popup-context-menus has served computing in a perfect way for a long time. But they thought they needed to change that. The horror. Seriously. And designers still make these huge interface design flaws.
Still yesterday (or was it today?) I was test-driving a replacement for the Windows Explorer. It is called "XYplorer". It features a tree view with a dual pane directory contents listing that also features tabs on each pane. There were so many flaws that I just purchased the program, wrote some improvement suggestions/advice, emailed the developers, and I won't even be using that program. Not for the time being. But I have high hopes for its future development, so I still wanted to contribute some money.
But in terms of word processors? I do not know where to go.
I recently started using the GIMP too. It has a seriously steep learning curve, and very little is intuitive... but at least once you learn the ropes it is an okay program. I do not like the multi-window setup at all - it requires me to minimize all other open applications so they don't clutter the background in between the open space between the windows. But it's doable and workable. I've been trying to improve my application toolset as of late. Will still take a while before everything is really properly functional.
But hey, we still have time.