New open office UI prototype | Hacker News Reader

New open office UI prototype

blogs.sun.com

14 pointskasunh13 comments

Looks like they ripped off Office 2007. Some people hate the ribbons, which I can understand, but I actually enjoy them. They kind of categorize different functions, so once you learn where something is, you can use that knowledge when you're looking for something LIKE it.

I think it's... disappointing... when people say that OpenOffice is a Microsoft Office clone, especially when they append "let's be honest", like it's something every Linux user has to admit and live with, like we have no choice and it's a raw deal.

I disagree with that, or at least I really want to and think that changing that is possible and healthy to the bottom line outcome of what something like OOo can become. But we look at what position open office is placed in http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001215.html, yet OOo has the daunting task of being a true competitor against Microsoft office, an office suite backed by a huge organization, even when compared next to Sun. I guess, from their perspective, they can mimic all MS Office's features within OOo and offer their product for free, and maybe that's enough to compete, but then it doesn't make OOo much better than it's competitor, it really just makes it a free clone, which is disappointing because it can be so much more.

Personally, my experience with the ribbon was negative, I thought it took a lot of screen real estate (especially since I always worked on a laptop) and essentially disrupted my previous toolbar work flow that I had spent time customizing. Whether OOo is making a 1 to 1 copy of the ribbon, I don't know, I haven't used it in such a long time, i forget what it looks like, but the opinion on the matter seems clearly laid out on the topic link.

Now that they are doing a UI redesign, now is a good time to define themselves, a lot like how Blender is and always has defined itself with it's UI http://www.cgcookie.com/articles/blender-25-overview. What blender has done was always amazing, and now, with 2.5 they are doing it again! that's crazy! and no one would ever call Blender a maya clone, or a 3dsmax clone. So i think, cloning something isn't really healthy, you don't create an identity, and I fell now OOo has a chance to finally define itself, do a little UX research and really define itself for it's users, create a different and better user experience we look out for and talk about and really compete with MS Office by offering something new.

If they don't do this now, then it's as if (us Linux users) we're never going to amount to anything more than users of a Clone platform in the desktop space, and at that point, we might as well cede: http://lifehacker.com/5290955/mac4lin-gives-linux-desktops-t...

The comments on the linked page say it, but it bears repeating: why blatantly rip off the features of your competition that are bad?

It's hard to call the office ribbon UI 100% bad. I've used it to some extent and it's actually grown on me. It's certainly weird and different, but they clearly put a lot of thought into it. In particular, the allocation of tasks to the different tabs is usually very good, and the automatic switching between them usually happens at the right time. I very frequently find myself looking for a toolbar button and immediately finding it because it showed up automatically.

What really gets me is, now that everybody has a wide-screen monitor, why do we continue to put administrative debris at the top and bottom of the screen? Most of what we care about (web sites, word processing, email) is tall and narrow anyway, so there's a lot of unused space on the sides.

Not enough people in the business world are using widescreen monitors or even "decent" resolutions. Executives and business types actually choose to use 1024x768 or sometimes smaller just so the text is bigger and easier to read. Shell has over 100,000 users worldwide on its intranet and have only just recently upgraded from IE6.

Most corporations have strict operating guidelines.

Agreed. I might even flip my widescreen monitor on its side. Maybe not at home, since movies don't work so well like that, but certainly in work where I don't watch movies.

Perhaps because the design of those features were backed up by statistical improvement metrics? http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/11/573348.aspx

Will I be able to select a chunk of text Or the entire document) and change the font size with some simple keyboard commands ( < and > , perhaps)?

The issues with the OOo UI are more in things being arcane or clunky, not the absence of pretty visual widgets.

On Windows that looks fine, but I wonder how that will look on say Linux or Mac OS X. Even MS didn't copy their ribbon style over to Office 2008 (they used something similar though). I hope OOo will do the same.

Drop it now.

Copy photoshop toolbars on the sides.

Monitors have more width than height.

Idea: Use two sidebars, one fixed to the left for formatting (never change its buttons so users don't get lost), one to the right that changes based on probable actions like working with tables as soon as you enter a table, or image manipulation, etc.

Leave just the menu on top for more vertical space for the document.

I'll use that.

ps. resize toolbars and use small icons when using monitors with resolution less than 1024x768.

What I love about your comment is that your idea is already possible with today's Open Office. Just no one takes advantage of it.

Then make it the default for next version, just redesign it to be part of the layout with huge buttons instead of just a toolbar dragged to the side.

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