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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#31

Post by duncanawoods »

tluyben2 wrote: post #8
duncanawoods wrote: post #3

Huh. I just tried Calc (6.0.7.3, Ubuntu 18.04) again this morning for the first time in a while and it crashed in seconds after right-clicking a few column headers. It's repeatable. When trying to navigate the very confusing document recovery dialogs to restart it, it then launched as Writer not Calc. I really wish it was an option but JFC. My experience with has always been so bad it doesn't even feel worth raising…

Could you make a video of that? I am clicking myself silly (ubuntu 18.04 / 6.0.7.3) and cannot repeat that behavior. I use calc a lot and it rarely crashes (less than excel/windows which, on my ms surface tablet, actually quite regularly crashes or hangs).

Sure, here you go:

https://imgur.com/a/PZMaqff

org.gnome.Shell.desktop[4355]: Window manager warning: Invalid WM_TRANSIENT_FOR window 0x9000024 specified for 0x9000965 (LibreOffic).

You have shamed me into raising a bug ;)

edit: raised, the 6.0 branch is EOL, doesn't happen in 6.4.5.2

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#32

Post by HeckFeck »

ubercow13 wrote: post #23
kungato wrote: post #17

Is there any electron gpl based Word and Excel alternative? I always imagined running on top of electron helped you skip a lot of work and helped the app not look like shit/LibreOffice

Libreoffice looks like a native desktop app. How do electron apps look better than that?

Plus, it is possible to customise the icons and colour scheme. There's light mode, dark mode, blue mode, even pink...

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#33

Post by bluGill »

openfuture wrote: post #20

It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…

Your school was wrong to teach any program. Ui follows fads and always will. Thus you need to learn how to use any ui that might come.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#34

Post by jl6 »

openfuture wrote: post #20

It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…

I used to feel that way about the ribbon, but I quickly got used to it and now consider it an improvement.

What I’ve never got used to is the flattening of the UI in versions 2013+.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#35

Post by bluGill »

unglaublich wrote: post #22
maxmouchet wrote: post #7

As much as I love free software, LibreOffice interface feels old and ugly (to me, at least). It would be nice if there was more focus on the UX/UI design in open source projects. Of course, most programmers are not UX/UI designers, and designers don't tend to work for free on open source projects.

No... the problem with desktop software is that creating a good UI/UX is a hard software problem typically solved by software developers instead of designers. Whereas, the accessibility and power of web technologies show that making UI/UX an easier software problem (HTML, CSS, JS) automatically attracts more designers yielding better UX/UI.

Your first point is correct, but as a ux designer (not what I do, but it is in my background), most web ui is terrible. It is done by designers, but they obviously have a background in art not user machine interaction and it shows. Once the page loads (takes too long Turing off users) it looks nice, but try getting anything done.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#36

Post by bluGill »

maxmouchet wrote: post #18
pulse7 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beauty/ugliness is subjective. For some it is "old and ugly", for some it is "retro".

I agree, and programmers (at least on HN) seems to prefer minimalist and/or retro interfaces. However I'm pretty confident that if I show such an interface to non technical people, they will feel that it doesn't look nice, compared to whatever proprietary app they use on their phone, Windows/Mac, ... I personally don't use Word nor LibreOffice (I use mostly LaTeX), but if we want free software to become more popular,…

I don't care how ugly it is. I care about how quickly people can get their work done. The ribbon is better for this because the things most often used are right there and easy to find. Sure rarely used stuff takes longer, but that is a good trade off.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#37

Post by HeckFeck »

openfuture wrote: post #20

It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…

Recently, I installed Office 97 onto Wine just for curiosity.

I could still do much with it. The only feature I really missed from Word was academic references. I could create documents indistinguishable from modern Word using the old drawing features combined with modern fonts.

The drop down menus, combined with the floating toolbars were much more intuitive than clicking up and down some "ribbon". The drop down menus map directly to the logical path of a task in my mind, eg "Insert -> Image -> From File". Having a small toolbar at the bottom with basic graphical tools is much more convenient than clicking back and forth from tab to tab.

It's a shame MS couldn't accept that what they had until Office 07 was a workflow polished near to perfection, perfected after years of refinement and familiarity.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#38

Post by Jonnax »

openfuture wrote: post #20

It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…

The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago.

What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus.

The most common operations are descriptive buttons.

Give someone word 2003 or word 2020 who has never used a word processor before. Which one would be more intuitive?

It's bad UI if people just learn where to click. They should be able to think in terms of "I want to do X" and be able to do that as quick as possible.

Of course with specialised tools that's a different story. AutoCAD hasn't really changed its interface but it got superceded in areas by new applications that break people's workflows in a lot of cases.

It's just a word processor. The knowledge you should have gained when being taught was the concepts of what you can do with one.

That should allow you to adapt to different software. Once you've used a word processor you don't need to read the help page for Google Docs.

It's not like switching from Maya to Blender.

I don't agree on the free software projects point. Often they're made by volunteers. And anything too "daring" would be shouted down by the community.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#39

Post by phaemon »

maxmouchet wrote: post #18
pulse7 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beauty/ugliness is subjective. For some it is "old and ugly", for some it is "retro".

I agree, and programmers (at least on HN) seems to prefer minimalist and/or retro interfaces. However I'm pretty confident that if I show such an interface to non technical people, they will feel that it doesn't look nice, compared to whatever proprietary app they use on their phone, Windows/Mac, ... I personally don't use Word nor LibreOffice (I use mostly LaTeX), but if we want free software to become more popular,…

Well, the head of the design team is Heiko Tietze. His PhD is in Psychology and he's worked at various companies as UX designer/lead.

So, why you'd you contact him and tell him where he's going wrong? I'm sure he'd value your insight and guidance.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#40

Post by syberspace »

openfuture wrote: post #20

It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…

With teaching UI you breed the class of people who will shout the loudest when something changes. Teaching your parents that "the internet" is the blue icon in the taskbar will teach them to call you when microsoft decides to install chromium-edge on their machine because "the internet is gone". Don't teach anyone how to use a specific UI, teach the concepts that made the UI look the way it does. And with that anyone will be able to transfer that knowledge to a slightly different looking UI without much of a problem.
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