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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#311

Post by satvikpendem »

u801e wrote: post #98
ghaff wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Don't teach anyone how to use a specific UI, teach the concepts that made the UI look the way it does. With all due respect, good luck with that. 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.

> 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.

That's exactly true. People don't care about the means, only the ends.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#312

Post by Animats »

Summary"

... There is the Personal Edition, which would be "forever free" and only available from the Document Foundation. This release would be tagged, according to the plan, "volunteer supported, not suggested for production environments or strategic documents". The alternative would be "LibreOffice Enterprise", which would only be available from "ecosystem members". This version would come with commercial support and a corresponding price tag. ... "There will be an X month gap between the release of the two versions: LibreOffice Online Enterprise and LibreOffice Online Personal".

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#313

Post by 6510 »

strbean wrote: post #298
jodrellblank wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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. T…

I really love good UI design and I'm convinced I don't have what it takes but I do keep seeing arguments and interfaces that seem quite weird to me. I would do it like this:

The desire to keep the document (or whatever it is) worked at on the screen during the "hunt" I consider a mistake. When mixing paint on a pallet the eyes are focused on what you are doing. You might want to look up to the canvas and back down again several times but there is never a need to do both.

I also feel drop down menus are a mistake. There (imho) should be a key on the keyboard to bring up the "hunting" screen (perhaps one that can be panned to the left right top and bottom with the arrow keys) and every "button" on that screen should be visually mapped to a key combination. F keys are great for this. First F key for the "button" group, second F key to pick one or a 3rd for 12 x 12 x 12 options.

When folder trees stop working because you have to much in them you should do tags (in addition) that can hold duplicates of the functionality. Then when tags also fail to scale you need a search feature. Each interface "button" or group should have a lot of hidden text by which it can be found. Typing cursive should highlight the italics "button".

It would definitely become a big mess but my gut says it can be sorted out and be equally accessible to people using it every day and first time or rarely users.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#314

Post by cat199 »

shawxe wrote: post #149
edoloughlin wrote: post #134

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 I've been using Office since the early 90's and the ribbon interface for the last 13 years. I still can't find stuff easily in the ribbon interface. It's like there's some cognitive barrier to me retaining the layout of anything beyond the Home ribbon (or tab?). Any time I…

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…

> It's a lot easier for me to read through a list of things in some category

this also creates a fixed 'path' cognitively since you are reading/naming the intermediate nodes on the way to any given task, and the intermediate nodes are consistently located in the same place spatially and in terms of the path. This is not the same as 'funky star button 2/3 of the way to the right and 1/3 down of the sub-scrolling subpanel of the customizable ribbon'

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#315

Post by IAmEveryone »

ubercow13 wrote: post #41
unglaublich wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>making UI/UX an easier software problem (HTML, CSS, JS) automatically attracts more designers yielding better UX/UI I find this a bit questionable. What are some examples of this good UX and UI? Many HTML-ish UIs I can think of are not good. Slack, Discord, modern Windows apps such as the new settings app for example. They tend to suffer from poor reimplementations of native widget functionality, poor implementation…

The products you mention are all hugely successful, often against the backdrop of existing OSS with similar features (IRC, for example).

Maybe there's some abstract notion of "good UI" that is distinct from "people like to use it". Or maybe people are stupid.

But on a purely empirical basis there is absolutely no evidence for the supremacy of the old UI paradigms you champion.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#316

Post by ghaff »

Spooky23 wrote: post #286
ghaff wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a cutesy way of saying a long time ago when all the lawyers used Wordperfect. (A word processing program that I hated almost as much as Wordstar.)

In some places, not so long ago :)

I imagine a lot of big law offices still have computers with WordPerfect on them so they can read old files if necessary.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#317

Post by gmueckl »

ModernMech wrote: post #266
MereInterest wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only are they jumbled, but they also change size/shape depending on the width of the window. A large button when full-screened becomes a small button when in a smaller window. A large button in a smaller window gets expanded to show all sub-options when maximized. There is no visual consistency for the same button.

That was a feature designed to fit more options on smaller screens. I personally like it and find it helpful.

It messes up any attempt to recollect of the locations of certain features in the bar. Some iterations of the ribbon even fold groups into menus under single buttons, so the exact path to feature then depends on the width of the window. This turns the ribbon into a pretty inconsistent user experience.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#318

Post by nazgulsenpai »

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…

It's been a few years but I had a client that needed some secure remote file access capability "like DropBox" so I spun up an ownCloud VM and it had a surprising amount of collaboration tools built-in. It had all the groups, permissions, sharing, etc stuff you'd expect, and you could open and edit Office documents in the browser (it was a web-based Zoho Word/Excel type editor if I remember correctly.) It also had automatic versioning so if someone jacked up one of the files, they could roll back to whenever.

For anyone looking for that sort of thing, ownCloud might not seem like an obvious choice but I was pleasantly surprised.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#319

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#320

Post by Answerawake »

HeckFeck wrote: post #37
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 men…

I went through a recent experiment like this as well. Instead I installed Office 2003(The last of the old toolbar offices) on a clean Windows 10 system. I was looking to validate my theory about the speed and bloat of the new versions of Office. I just had this nagging feeling that the software wasn't as fast as old versions. It was confirmed. Using the old Office just felt so pleasant with how fast it loaded and simple it is in terms of cognitive load.
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