Re: [tdf-discuss] An Interesting Mockup

Hi everyone,

I'm the mock-ups creator. It's the firt time that I use a mail list like 
that and english is not my own language, so I'm not sure if I'm doing it 
right.

First, thank you Animesh Meher for starting this threat.

I totally agree with Zaphod for a decent discussion on the LibO's UI. 
And the Microsoft's mistake is a good guideline to help this process. It 
been said, I would like to help you if it's possible. I'm not a 
professional designer, but I'm a Computer Science student and art is 
part of my whole live. I worked some years with Corel Draw and Photoshop 
and the last 5 years with Blender, Inkscape (1.000.000x better than 
Corel) and Gimp.

I'm a big Blender Foundation fan and when they were working on a 
completly new interface for Blender (my guess it was over 2008) many 
people has afraid of what would be it. The first releases was very 
simple and disgusting, since it was a big change and "everything" should 
be relearned. There was many noise on it for months. But finally, in 
2009,the Blender Foundation showed a polished interface, very very 
different from the original one. Users become to apreciate it and to 
learn more about it. Today, the new interface is the think I most 
apreciate in Blender: it's the top of customization, it's beautiful, 
it's completely usable. But there's no perfect UIs, so they keep 
changing it to get closer to what the users want. And the users *really* 
discuss about it, i.e. in the BlenderArtists forum.

I really hope to see this process of reconstruction happening to 
LibreOffice. Since its a revival of the closed OpenOffice, I see a big 
potential to become a highlight office suite on Linux desktops. But I 
see the need of a important refresh on UI. Just like Blender did.

Well, I'm sure it's over me, but I'm here if you need of my efforts. I'm 
not capable to code satisfastorily in C, Java or Python yet, but I hope 
this halfyear I'll become to learn how to do that. Right now I just know 
HTML, CSS and basic programing.

Kudos for the LibO development team!
~Paulo José

   "Zaphod Feeblejocks" writes:
   I'm all for a decent discussion on the UI, and appreciate the comment on the
   side-bar.
   Could the current top-bar with icons etc be made moveable (just as the Win 95
   start bar
   was, when I moved to the side it by accident and couldn't get it back to the
   bottom.... ah,
   memories...)

   However, we need to avoid Microsoft's mistake of forcing their Ribbon on
   people, without
   letting them have a 'Classic' interface.  (1) the Ribbon lacks consistency; (2)
   Office 2007
   had 60% global market share in summer 2010 - a failure by Microsoft's
   standards.  Office
   2003 had 20% - many of whom were Ribbon refusenicks.  The other 20% was a
   steadily
   growing OOo.

   Granted, the current LibO/OOo interface looks dated, but people know their way
   round it - at
   least the know how to find the things they use.  Some things are far too clumsy
   (e.g. mail-
   merging).  A sudden change would drive people (well, me) back over to OOo.

   Let's reach a proper concensus.

--
Paulo José O. Amaro
Computer Science Student
Federal University of São João del-Rei
WebDesigner / Linked Empresa Júnior
Blogger / casatwain.com

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