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" wrote:
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
