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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#41

Post by ubercow13 »

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.

>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 implementations of scrollable elements especially infinitely scrollable ones, low information density and too much whitespace often exacerbated by flat design, janky responsiveness often with high latency.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#42

Post by spystath »

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 common occurrence having software dismissed as second rate because it's "ugly" or non-conforming to current design trends. Although form and function should enhance each other we've now reached a point where changes to form actively harm function. Toolbars are gone, menus are gone, icons are abstract outlines of what they represent, discoverability in GUI applications is hampered. I can find quite a few examples of applications both mobile and desktop that have become increasingly frustrating to use for no benefit whatsoever. "Where has this button gone? I'm sure it was here before"; "Oh I need to click the nondescript three-bullet button, then tap actions and there it is!"; "But the colours are now nice". Especially in a productivity tool I'd rather not have the interface change every other release because it's "ugly" by some abstract metric. Although I believe the ribbon turned out to be a decent design I'm fairly certain that wouldn't have been the case if Microsoft had changed again to something completely different within a release.

So, yeah... Please give me ugly but predictable interfaces.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#43

Post by ghaff »

jl6 wrote: post #34
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 used to feel that way about the ribbon, but I quickly got used to it and now consider it an improvement. What I’ve never got used to is the flattening of the UI in versions 2013+.

I never loved the ribbon and I suspect that Microsoft underestimated how disruptive the change was for a lot of people. However, I saw a presentation by one of the lead designers around the time that it was introduced and he certainly made a good case for how the older interface had accumulated way too much cruft.

ADDED: Ah, this is probably it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4

(That said, MS Office in general had been loaded with so many functions that 1% of users used but that were absolutely essential to some 1% that it's something of a mess anyway. It's one reason I prefer the relative simplicity of GSuite these days.)

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#44

Post by solarkraft »

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…

While I somewhat get what you mean (and hate ribbbons), the Office UI is just way less crappy than LibreOffice's. It has smooth scrolling, some animated state, and they're at least trying to get rid of some visual and semantic cruft, so it's a lot less of a pain to use than LibreOffice.

Of course progress sometimes means breaking changes, software in general and especially LibreOffice is nowhere near a point at which we can afford to stop improving. It's not about changing things for the sake of changing things, it's about making things less painful (and hopefully ultimately delightful) to use.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#45

Post by kuschku »

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

If you want to see how moving from Java to Electron destroys an application, while making it look "better", try out GeoGebra Classic 6 and GeoGebra Classic 5.

The difference is stunning. Geogebra 5, written in Java, is just so much more performant, and feels so much more like an application, not a broken website.

The same actually applies to pgAdmin 3 vs pgAdmin 4.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#46

Post by mrob »

davidhyde wrote: post #29

It seems like this whole thing could be solved by renaming the tag from "Personal Edition" to "Lite Edition" or something. People want to use and "office" product for work, duh. The document foundation keep arguing that funding is needed and the users keep arguing that they want a free version for commercial use and that naming is important because "the boss won't read the license agreement but look at the name! Pers…

"Lite Edition" isn't much better. The usual name for this kind of thing is "Community Edition", which has no negative connotations. But I don't see why it needs any special name. The LibreOffice brand is already harmed by the continued existence of OpenOffice, which many people still think of as the default free (as in beer) office suite despite its obsolescence. Complicating the LibreOffice name will only make things worse. IMO it should remain plain "LibreOffice", and the paid support version can be "LibreOffice Enterprise Edition".

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#47

Post by andrepd »

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.

> 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

"Modern" UIs are often atrocious, and I'm not the only person who thinks so.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#50

Post by npteljes »

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

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