GUI was a mistake.
LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
61–70 of 433 posts
Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#62Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#63It'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…
The ribbon interface it not just a "fad", it is a clear UI improvement since it removes a level of indirection.
If you wanted to see how a font looked in the classic Word UI, you highlighted a text and selected a font from the dropdown. When the dropdown was changed to show the actual font, it was the first step towards the ribbon, where the UI generally shows the actual effect of the options.
Programmers does not understand this difference, since they are used to work on abstraction levels removed from the actual output. So the ribbon seem like a fad just like the mouse and icons was seen as a fad by many developers back in the day. ("Why don't people just learn LaTeX?")
Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#64I hate to rant, but there is a weird sense of entitlement in many comments. An assumption that software should "just work", be completely bug free, have the best design, have developers quickly responding to bug reports, etc, while giving away the product for free. I might not use an office suite very often, but when I do, I'm grateful it exists and is free/libre. Some orgs (gov, companies, service providers/reseller…
To be fair there is simple free open source software that just works, like vim. It is just that people should understand that with complicated and necessarily bloated software which does a lot of things major bugs are inevitable basically fate.
Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#65I‘d like to use a open source text editor. But libreoffice text rendering is so bad, i cant use it. At least thats the case for me on osx, but i think this applies to all plattforms.
Just compare text rendered in libreoffice and to the one in pages. It hurts my eyes.
Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, and programmers (at least on HN) seems to prefer minimalist and/or retro interfaces. However I'm pretty confident that if I show such an interface to non technical people, they will feel that it doesn't look nice, compared to whatever proprietary app they use on their phone, Windows/Mac, ... I personally don't use Word nor LibreOffice (I use mostly LaTeX), but if we want free software to become more popular,…
I don't care how ugly it is. I care about how quickly people can get their work done. The ribbon is better for this because the things most often used are right there and easy to find. Sure rarely used stuff takes longer, but that is a good trade off.
Is there some way to move stuff in word so that it is more accessible. Just wondering.
Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#67Wordstar and Wordperfect were easier to use imo.
Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#68Can we expect an Auto-Update within the next 5 years?
Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#69It'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…
The ribbon interface it not just a "fad", it is a clear UI improvement since it removes a level of indirection. If you wanted to see how a font looked in the classic Word UI, you highlighted a text and selected a font from the dropdown. When the dropdown was changed to show the actual font, it was the first step towards the ribbon, where the UI generally shows the actual effect of the options. Programmers does not un…
I disagree.
The number of times I had to use "Tell me what you want to do"-field is on a stupid level compared to the rich toolbar and extensive menus that existed pre-2007.
Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#70It'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…
With teaching UI you breed the class of people who will shout the loudest when something changes. Teaching your parents that "the internet" is the blue icon in the taskbar will teach them to call you when microsoft decides to install chromium-edge on their machine because "the internet is gone". Don't teach anyone how to use a specific UI, teach the concepts that made the UI look the way it does. And with that anyone…
>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.