Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 433 posts

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#121

Post by XorNot »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #97
red_admiral wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to disagree here. Alice is a new user who has never used Word before. Between word 2003 and 2020, I grant she'll pick up 2020 much more quickly - point in favour of the new one. Bob is an employee who uses Word just short of 4 hours a day, 5 days a week writing and editing reports (the rest of the time he spends in Outlook, excel etc.). If there's a task that Bob does 50 times in a typical week, then it doe…

So what's kept Bob from committing the ribbon interface to memory in the past 17 years?

The ribbon interface removed customizability, and inflated the size of all the common commands (and also made it impossible to get them back without 3rd party extensions).

Pre-Ribbon I could have the menus, file operations, font and paragraph settings, and the reviewing tool bar at the top of my screen. I could have the object and image editing at the bottom.

Post-ribbon the exact same amount of space is does a third as much. Reviewing for some reason is now on a separate tab. The menus are less commonly used functions are non-existent, stuck somewhere under "File" which now takes over the whole screen when I open it.

It is not just "different" it's worse. It removes the basic ability to prioritize my interface to the types of tasks I'm doing, in favor of some vaguely defined every-user who is not actually a real user.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#122

Post by slfnflctd »

bluGill wrote: post #33
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.

I agree with this, but it was far less clear in the 90s. I think a lot of people (myself included) were expecting/hoping that UIs in productivity software were converging on some sort of finished design or standard that there wouldn't be much reason to monkey around with.

MS Office programs - and many other proprietary software titles - were taught not only in many schools, but also in various vocational programs. You could get 'certified' in having 'mastered' a particular UI, and you expected that knowledge to continue to be useful for years. Seems quaint now, but there were some nice things about it. A carpenter doesn't expect their saws & hammers to radically morph every product cycle.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#123

Post by dethos »

red_admiral wrote: post #76
Jonnax wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm going to disagree here. Alice is a new user who has never used Word before. Between word 2003 and 2020, I grant she'll pick up 2020 much more quickly - point in favour of the new one. Bob is an employee who uses Word just short of 4 hours a day, 5 days a week writing and editing reports (the rest of the time he spends in Outlook, excel etc.). If there's a task that Bob does 50 times in a typical week, then it doe…

indeed. Focusing only on the newcomer and more precisely the person using it for the first time is just a fraction of the "problem".

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#124

Post by mattbee »

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.

Whoa.

I much prefer finding my way around any "badly designed" UI that can respond in 20-100ms a "well designed" UI that responds in 500-5000ms.

Most web software providers don't (can't!) deal with server latency or the client-side processing of the JS/CSS etc. that they use. That's why I use a lot of "well designed" UIs that respond slower than equivalent systems from the 1980s.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#125

Post by analog31 »

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…

My kids are recent high school graduates. When they were in grade school, they learned MS Office. They easily picked up the newer stuff as it has come along, and at the same time, the schools have gotten a lot more flexible. It just wasn't a problem. Today they use Google Docs or whatever.

At my workplace, I see gradually declining use of any kind of word processing. Folks just edit in the e-mail or chat editor. One colleague makes video blogs.

Word processing seems to remain, largely for documents that will never be read, such as HR announcements and dissertations. ;-)

I've written lengthy documents in the chat editor, and have discovered to my great surprise and pleasure, that people actually read them. One thing that seems to be important is for people to be able to read things easily on their phones.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#126

Post by XorNot »

TheChaplain wrote: post #69
goto11 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ribbon interface it not just a "fad", it is a clear UI improvement since it removes a level of indirection. If you wanted to see how a font looked in the classic Word UI, you highlighted a text and selected a font from the dropdown. When the dropdown was changed to show the actual font, it was the first step towards the ribbon, where the UI generally shows the actual effect of the options. Programmers does not un…

I disagree. The number of times I had to use "Tell me what you want to do"-field is on a stupid level compared to the rich toolbar and extensive menus that existed pre-2007.

I mean ironically that's actually a much better solution - I love Jetbrains "search everywhere" field in Idea to find specific commands quickly.

So why in the heck the ribbon even needs to exist is baffling - just make a command search/command line input, and then if it's literally on a toolbar on screen, highlight it for me (configurably) so I as a new user know what to click on next time.

The ribbon is just somehow, always exactly wrong.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#127

Post by grandinj »

rspoerri wrote: post #65

I‘d like to use a open source text editor. But libreoffice text rendering is so bad, i cant use it. At least thats the case for me on osx, but i think this applies to all plattforms. Just compare text rendered in libreoffice and to the one in pages. It hurts my eyes.

(LO Dev) Unfortunately, mac has the least interested programmers available to debug issues, and there is some weird interaction going on with our rendering on macOS that we can't track down.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#128

Post by ghaff »

hnarn wrote: post #88
ghaff wrote: post #51

There seems to be a very large elephant missing from that discussion which is the rise of SaaS office suites. Speaking personally, I'm very glad that there is a free software office suite (as well as drawing programs etc.) However, I sincerely hope that collaborating on documents and presentations by mailing them around to people and trying to merge their edits and comments is never again the norm for me. Shared docu…

I agree, the main point I would expect from "The next five years of LibreOffice" would be a self-hosted competitor to Google Docs and Office 365. There's definitely a place for a local application editing documents, but I don't think that's what's going to matter the most five years from now when compared to a solid web based alternative -- and I also don't think a "code freeze" for the "normal" LibreOffice (not that…

There's definitely a market for self-hosting as in the case of Nextcloud, for example. There are lots of reasons companies, much less governments, may not feel comfortable using Google or Microsoft SaaS offerings.

But, as you say, that's different from running a local application. While some heavy-duty multimedia still benefits from running an app locally, that ship has mostly sailed with office suite software. I still have LibreOffice installed on most of my systems, but even if I'm not collaborating on a document, it's incredibly useful to have docs that are "just there" and I can access from any device--even including my phone in a pinch.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#129

Post by ubermonkey »

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…

MSFT had reason to believe that the Ribbon was more accessible and discoverable to users than the old menu structure. I was dubious at the time, but since the shift I have come to believe that they are correct. I think the Ribbon is better for the vast majority of users.

Interfaces shouldn't be changed for no good reason -- and MSFT is certainly guilty of chasing fads or tweaks without a clear benefit, too, in other areas -- but neither should an interface be frozen in amber if a better idea comes along.

(Also remember that mass market software isn't designed for people who post on HN.)

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#130

Post by grandinj »

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.

(LO Dev) We actually have quite an active ui-design sub-group, which tries it's best to refresh the look and feel.

Feel free to join in :-)

Post reply on HN