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

LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

blog.documentfoundation.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 162 posts

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#131

Post by k-mcgrady »

DanBC wrote: post #119
k-mcgrady wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did I mention spiritual beliefs??? As for these being my guidelines - they aren't. In my time using HN I've seen many, many people advocate that guideline. It might be useful to rethink your attitude when commenting your average karma is less than one.

There are a group of people who suggest that downvoting should only be used to hide comments that don't add to discussion. PG has said that downvote to disagree is acceptable. Can you point to anything in the guidelines or introductions or faqs about not downvotig for disagreement? Since it's impossible to eliminate downvotig for disagreement you may as well just let it happen.

There definitely isn't anything in the guidelines pointing towards either behaviour. I totally respect PG's opinion on it. I find though that HN fosters better discussion that other sites because unpopular opinions are just down votes - they're debated and not hidden. I could just let it happen but hopefully by contributing my thoughts on it those who down vote for disagreement will change.

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#132

Post by k-mcgrady »

anonbanker wrote: post #118
k-mcgrady wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did I mention spiritual beliefs??? As for these being my guidelines - they aren't. In my time using HN I've seen many, many people advocate that guideline. It might be useful to rethink your attitude when commenting your average karma is less than one.

Yeah, I edited it, but understand I figured you were the kind of person who wouldn't barf all over a thread with your spiritual beliefs, and meant that part as a compliment. I've advocated your same guidelines in the past, as they promote a healthy site/forum, but they are not HN's guidelines. PG has actually encouraged the antithesis of your guidelines in the past, so I'm compelled to tell you as much.

Sure that's fine. It's definitely not part of the guidelines (as you said) but I think it's also fine for me to advocate what I think leads to better discussions. It's one of the reasons I enjoy HN. Unlike other sites there is less hive mind. Unpopular opinions are debated rather than just hidden.

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#133

Post by jamesmishra »

macspoofing wrote: post #37
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #2

While this is certainly a step in the right direction, it displeases me that the FOSS community is so hostile to the ribbon-style UI MS uses in its office product. Its such a great concept that using LO is like stepping back into the Office 97 days. Frankly, I'd rather just pay every few years for a home edition of Office than do all the mental gymnastic needed to properly switch to LO.

>Its such a great concept that using LO is like stepping back into the Office 97 days. Maybe there's a reason why ribbon-style components haven't really taken off outside of core Microsoft products. I don't think the ribbon is actually that great-looking and I don't think it's that functional. I'm also a fan of a LO forging it's own identity. For far to long Open Office strove to mimic MS Office in look-and-feel.

Autodesk Inventor uses the Ribbon, and it makes doing 3D CAD extraordinarily intuitive.

I think the sibling comment is right---the ribbon makes a lot of sense when you have tons and tons of commands.

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#134

Post by rz2k »

_-__--- wrote: post #21
jrochkind1 wrote: post #17

So it's better... but from the screenshot, I'd say myself it's design now reaches "barely acceptable", instead of the previous "pretty bad", but not "delightful" either. Of course, I think I could say the same (or worse) about MS Word, it's main competitor. So.

Curious - there are a lot of ways to say the terminal "so." I would have thought that ellipses (so...) capture the affect with which most people deliver it, but the hard stop actually adds a nice twang to it. I imagine the speaker quickly saying it, pursing their lips slightly and tilting their head to one side while maintaining eye contact with the other party in the conversation. But yeah, totes agree on the design…

Since we're going off topic, I thought this was a pretty funny treatment of the ellipsis http://www.themillions.com/2014/01/dumbest-thing-ever-scribb...

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#135

Post by throwaway349283 »

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…

If you don't value design you're incompetent as a developer. Why would you even contribute to a project if you don't want what's best for the project?

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#136

Post by DanBC »

krylon wrote: post #116
anon13839 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnumeric is a large steaming pile of dog poo. Do a sort on a largeish file and it will consume all the known RAM in the universe. Do the same operation in Excel and it barely breaks a sweat.

I once had to open a CSV file with about 2,000 columns. Excel failed me, OpenOffice/LibreOffice failed me, only Gnumeric managed to open the file. I'll admit that I only deal with that many columns on very rare occasions, but it does come in handy sometimes.

In theory Excel can open files with 16,384 columns so it's surprising it failed.

https://support.office.com/en-nz/article/Excel-specification...

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#137

Post by the_why_of_y »

robin_reala wrote: post #47

If anyone follows this, what’s the current with LibreOffice vs OpenOffice.org? Is one objectively better than the other now? What has the community momentum?

OpenOffice.org died years ago. You are probably thinking of Apache OpenOffice.

Regarding momentum, compare:

http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/openoffice/trunk/?view=log

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#138

Post by nhaehnle »

tormeh wrote: post #123
nhaehnle wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it does, so what? I'm all for having designers on the team, but gratuitous redesigns often end up for the worse. Something like LibreOffice is a giant piece of software produced by a team that is far too small. They have to be conservative, and they have to focus their energy properly. Frankly, instead of playing around with trying to make things "beautiful" (which is hopeless anyway, given how opinions diffe…

The Ribbon UI idea - to highlight contextually relevant options and hide irrelevant ones - seems like a worthy idea to copy. That said, using horizontal rather than vertical space would be good.

There are good things about the ribbon, true, and you're spot on about using horizontal space. I wonder though whether the LibreOffice team have enough solid data about user behavior to make good decisions in what would be a huge redesign - not to mention that, judging by the screenshots, they are already starting to make good use of horizontal space.

Also, I'd personally prefer if instead of just permuting UI elements they would adapt some of the really nice ideas that really make things flow better for everyday users. I suppose it's nice to have a bigger Undo button, but wouldn't it be less contentious and more useful in the long term to teach people about Ctrl+Z?

In particular, the live previews don't require a permutation of the UI layout, and (during my admittedly limited use) I found it to be the nicest of the changes that people usually associate with the Ribbon.

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#140

Post by makecheck »

chengiz wrote: post #127
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #2

While this is certainly a step in the right direction, it displeases me that the FOSS community is so hostile to the ribbon-style UI MS uses in its office product. Its such a great concept that using LO is like stepping back into the Office 97 days. Frankly, I'd rather just pay every few years for a home edition of Office than do all the mental gymnastic needed to properly switch to LO.

I have come to dislike all manner of menu based interfaces. They are annoying as fuck unless you are well used to the program, and then they keep changing them with different versions. What I would like is a search as you type entry field, similar to the Windows 7 start menu. I type in "cro..." and cross reference shows up, then I click on it. And it'd have the option of keeping the commonly used ones nearby for easy…

The Mac OS X Help menu has this type of search, provided that all application commands are in menus.
Post reply on HN