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LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

blog.documentfoundation.org

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Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#61

Post by vinkelhake »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #46
shRaj9fEc8Vith wrote: post #38

Don't OSS project has professional designer? I mean like Apple-quality designers?

Have you ever tried contributing to a popular FOSS product? I have. Expect to be downvoted, yelled at, etc for suggesting change, especially change that's an emotional issue for geeks (implementing a ribbon-like interface, you know the one started by the 'evil' microsoft). Linus's childish attitude is pretty much the poster boy for this attitude. Namecalling is the norm. There are so many cultural and management issu…

I think a lot of it comes down to what a visual designer can contribute. FOSS projects are typically the sum of individual contributions from a lot of people, all scratching their itches. There is limited scope for someone to tell other people what they need to do.

A designer who can't code is dependent on other people donating their time so that the design can be realized. This puts the designer at an immediate disadvantage.

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#63

Post by nkoren »

cheald wrote: post #56

Windows user here. It's not particularly any prettier, and Calc doesn't open CSVs correctly anymore. So yeah, there's that. http://i.imgur.com/i1YuVXA.png

Earlier this week I wasted 45 minutes trying to figure out why the software I've been writing was producing Chinese CSVs, before I finally thought to open them in some software other than LibreOffice. Thanks, Libre!

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#64

Post by cheald »

chris_wot wrote: post #62
cheald wrote: post #56

Windows user here. It's not particularly any prettier, and Calc doesn't open CSVs correctly anymore. So yeah, there's that. http://i.imgur.com/i1YuVXA.png

Can you file a bug report and send over the file you are using?

Where should I file it?

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#65

Post by cheald »

zuck9 wrote: post #60
cheald wrote: post #56

Windows user here. It's not particularly any prettier, and Calc doesn't open CSVs correctly anymore. So yeah, there's that. http://i.imgur.com/i1YuVXA.png

Tried changing the encoding?

That did the trick. Flipped it to UTF-8 and it works now. I should have noticed that before, but then, I'm not sure why it's defaulting to UTF-16 for CSVs!

I appreciate the UI work, but come on, the simple stuff can't break.

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#66

Post by themoonbus »

shRaj9fEc8Vith wrote: post #38

Don't OSS project has professional designer? I mean like Apple-quality designers?

The problem is that under most open source models of governance, it's far easier to create good software than to design good interfaces due to the processes involved.

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#67

Post by chops »

chris_wot wrote: post #58
chops wrote: post #50

While I appreciate effort put into making the interface prettier, one of the things that really detracts from LibreOffice and why I almost invariably end up installing MS Word for clients is the confusing way which the mail merge system is designed in LibreOffice. I've done it enough times now to know mostly how to get it working for myself, but there's no way in hell I'll try teaching a client how to do a mail merge…

That's not good at all. If you log a bug, you should be able to send over the documents in confidence - this sounds pretty bad.

Next time I encounter this, I'll definitely do it. I might still have a file around that's doing it, in which case, I'll give it a send hopefully today or tomorrow. Thanks!

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#68

Post by themoonbus »

vinkelhake wrote: post #61
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever tried contributing to a popular FOSS product? I have. Expect to be downvoted, yelled at, etc for suggesting change, especially change that's an emotional issue for geeks (implementing a ribbon-like interface, you know the one started by the 'evil' microsoft). Linus's childish attitude is pretty much the poster boy for this attitude. Namecalling is the norm. There are so many cultural and management issu…

I think a lot of it comes down to what a visual designer can contribute. FOSS projects are typically the sum of individual contributions from a lot of people, all scratching their itches. There is limited scope for someone to tell other people what they need to do. A designer who can't code is dependent on other people donating their time so that the design can be realized. This puts the designer at an immediate disa…

Exactly. In some sense, you have to dictate to people who you have no power over, and do not respect you (obviously, I'm exaggerating a bit).

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#69

Post by ForHackernews »

chops wrote: post #50

While I appreciate effort put into making the interface prettier, one of the things that really detracts from LibreOffice and why I almost invariably end up installing MS Word for clients is the confusing way which the mail merge system is designed in LibreOffice. I've done it enough times now to know mostly how to get it working for myself, but there's no way in hell I'll try teaching a client how to do a mail merge…

Huh. This is an interesting example of a feature that's very important to some people, and utterly irrelevant to others. I had never even heard of "mail merge" in the context of word processing software, only mass-emailers, and it would never have occurred to me that anyone was using desktop word processing software to run their paper-mailing campaigns.

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#70

Post by kinleyd »

bitL wrote: post #26

I am probably in the minority, but even AbiWord looks way better than this new design - let's have simplistic monochrome icons on our 4k 10-bit displays everywhere! Also, the font on toolbars is sci-fi and not serious-work-like. Huge white spaces everywhere with gradients out of place. I like the new fonts (seems inspired by Yosemite) and the bottom shape panel is nice as well.

I like AbiWord, but for some reason it keeps crashing on my Arch Linux system.

Between Libre Calc and Excel, I've always had to revert to Excel for its Pivot Table features. Libre Calc has thus far made a very weak stab at that for me.

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