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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#291

Post by andrewshadura »

npteljes wrote: post #50
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

There is, actually. ONLYOFFICE offers their AGPL word processor, spreadsheet etc programs as Electron apps too. The UI is absolutely modern, and one of their other selling point is their DOCX/XLSX compatibility. https://www.onlyoffice.com/desktop.aspx

> selling point is their DOCX/XLSX compatibility.

Which they fail to deliver, given that LibreOffice manages to be more compatible with docx than they are.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#292

Post by 1123581321 »

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 also took a pre-ribbon exam for Word in high school, and I’ve had no trouble applying those concepts to successive versions, even though I’ve never been a heavy user. I dare say most software doesn’t change quickly enough for intensive early use to become totally irrelevant.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#293

Post by andrewshadura »

lbwtaylor wrote: post #273
andrewshadura wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OnlyOffice are not a community-oriented project, with their aggressive usage of AGPL+CLA, previous policy of withholding parts of code and throwing the rest over the wall once in a while, and their compatibility is far from what they claim: LibreOffice is far better compatible with MSO. Also, feature-wise it's crippled in comparison not only with LibreOffice proper, but even with LibreOffice Online.

> LibreOffice is far better compatible with MSO Why do you say that? I trialed both of them with an array of complex Word documents and OnlyOffice far outperformed.

> > LibreOffice is far better compatible with MSO

> Why do you say that? I trialed both of them with an array of complex Word documents and OnlyOffice far outperformed.

Not in my experience. OnlyOffice often failed to render simple documents LibreOffice had no problems with at all.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#296

Post by Andrex »

criddell wrote: post #175
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…

> It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. You might be interested in checking out the work of Donald Norman. He makes a great case that attractive things work better. Old isn't necessarily a problem, but ugly is. https://jnd.org/emotion_design_attractive_things_work_better...

This seems intuitive enough to me but years on HN have let me know it's a rare opinion, at least among developers.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#297

Post by woah »

jodrellblank wrote: post #167
shawxe wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this completely. It's a lot easier for me to read through a list of things in some category than it is for me to scan through a bunch of irregularly sized tiles for the icon and description of the configuration I need. For me, all of the pictures just lower the density of the information and cause it to take longer to parse every single time. I also question the basic premise that the tabbed interface is…

> “ I also question the basic premise that the tabbed interface is somehow more intuitive for new users. Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point. ” Uh, yeah there was? Go dig through the wayback machine for Jensen Harris’s blogpost series about the design of the ribbon, or watch his MIX08 talk on it; he was the design team lead for the change, and the r…

There's never any shortage of cranky commenters on HN with eloquently written 4 paragraph posts about how some complicated interface from 1993 is the pinnacle of computing productivity, demanding peer reviewed studies to the contrary.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#298

Post by strbean »

jodrellblank wrote: post #260
jodrellblank wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “ I also question the basic premise that the tabbed interface is somehow more intuitive for new users. Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point. ” Uh, yeah there was? Go dig through the wayback machine for Jensen Harris’s blogpost series about the design of the ribbon, or watch his MIX08 talk on it; he was the design team lead for the change, and the r…

"There's absolutely no evidence for this" "yes there was, here's what to look for" "downvote". HN.txt. Top level menus full by Word 95. Office 97 added command bars. Nested menus and toolbars full by Office 2000. Office XP added Task panes, full of features by Office 2003. " the Task Pane was the last attempt to find a way to scale old-style UI to programs as full-featured as Office. Although it was a successful stop…

> It's either there or it's not--there are no other "rocks" to look under

Nit pick on this quote: every time I've used the ribbon, I need features that have been collapsed into a "more" list (hamburger menu?) for that section of the ribbon.

Also:

> you need to look through 3 levels of hierarchical menus, open up 31 toolbars and peruse about 20 Task Panes.

I'm really dubious that the ribbon is better in this regard. Those menus still exist, and I end up falling back to them with some regularity after searching the ribbons and not finding what I want (perhaps it is hidden in a hamburger menu). Furthermore, each option in the ribbon takes up far more screen real estate than an item in the drop down menu, and there are sub-dialogs still abound.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#299

Post by mixmastamyk »

jm4 wrote: post #276
macspoofing wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Imagine taking enough of that money to support these 40 LibreOffice developers and maybe say 20 more. There are infinite ways to spend every dollar, why is LibreOffice funding worthy? In other words, why is LibreOffice's popularity so low that it cannot find a way to fund its operations? Which then raises the question - why do you want to fund an unpopular project?

It's not really worthy of funding anymore. Certainly not by the government. It's just not competitive with other options. I used to be a longtime Libre Office user. Back then, MS Office was expensive and only available on Windows. Even the Mac version wasn't completely compatible. MS Office is better than it's ever been, with a variety of licensing options that are affordable. And if you're a student you can get it f…

Imagine paying a subscription to access my own documents! Paying for privacy to be hoovered up to another corporation.

Sure, I bet they have some good features that I probably wont use.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#300

Post by u801e »

sidlls wrote: post #238
u801e wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of people aren't interested in learning about file systems or how DNS operates. They want to know what button to order from Amazon. That's like saying people aren't interested in learning how to use a phonebook or how to call directory assistance. They just want to know who to talk to so they can order what they want from Sears.

How so? I don't understand this analogy at all. UI/UX design changes frequently involves changing the appearance and possibly location and even functionality of familiar things. If we changed the lettering in a phonebook, or even merely on the cover, to be, say, klingon font, we shouldn't expect the typical user to reach for that phonebook, yet essentially what the GP is suggesting is that it's sufficient for a user…

> I don't understand this analogy at all. UI/UX design changes frequently involves changing the appearance and possibly location and even functionality of familiar things.

And that's the fundamental problem because that doesn't take into account people who are familiar with how a particular application works. For example, if you compare a tape recorder, VCR, a DVD player, and a streaming service where you can play, pause, forward or rewind, it's essentially the same interface and that has been the case since the '70s.

It's similar to dialing a phone with a touch-tone system versus dialing a number on a smartphone (other than having to press a call button). The only major change in the UI was when the transition between rotary dial to touch-tone took place. Automobiles are another example (placement of the brake, accelerator, shifter, turn signal stalk, headlamp controls, etc (though things do differ from model to model to some extent).

So why do we keep changing the interface of computer applications every so often such that proficient users have to relearn how to do things? The reason appears to be that we're chasing a goal of making the UI more intuitive so that someone who hasn't used it before can figure it out, but that never seems to happen.

But, if people just learn how to use the existing UI, then they can use the application and other applications like it because of a standard interface.

> If we changed the lettering in a phonebook, or even merely on the cover, to be, say, klingon font, we shouldn't expect the typical user to reach for that phonebook, yet essentially what the GP is suggesting is that it's sufficient for a user to understand the "phonebook concept" and users can learn the implementation details trivially based on that.

A more accurate analogy would be to change the order of the listings in the phonebook to start from most common names and end in least common ones instead of being in alphabetical order because of the belief it would help new users find the information they're looking for faster compared to the traditional interface.

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