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Aqua OpenOffice for Mac OS X
rhetland writes "An article on O'Reilly network discusses the new port of OpenOffice to Mac OS X. The public beta, due out next week, will be posted on the OpenOffice Mac site. I have been waiting for this for months, and can hardly wait."
Lots of people would say that having three different suites is a bad thing, but I don't think so anymore:
My father is a blogger.
X11 is going beta next week, not aqua. the aqua version is still in the planning stages.
This is still the X11 version. Sure, it'll be nice to try it, but it won't have Mac look and feel, and certainly won't obey the Human Interface Guidelines yet. It seems that the Aqua demo was of NeoOffice, which is just a proof of concept for developers, not a real distribution.
Looks like there's a lot more work to be done...
The thing is, user interface standards are, I think everyone would agree, generally a good thing. But different platforms have different ideas about what the standards should be. Any particular standard isn't necessarily better or worse than any of the others as long as it's consistent, logical, and easily learned. And as long as one standard is consistent & logical & so on, it's more of a problem to try to impose another systems consistent, logical framework. So for example the Aqua guidelines suggest how to arrange menus, what functionality should be in each one, how to arrange dialog windows, keystrokes to adhere to, etc. The Windows guidelines make different recommendations in each of these areas. The goal should be to adapt to the local system, so that users don't have to adapt to whatever platform the software was developed on.
The shambling train wreck here is Linux and X11, where the best you can hope for is some particular toolkits suggested but generally half thought out HIG standard. The best you can hope for is what Gnome or KDE offers, but still you as a user can't assume that all applications you use are going to adhere to one, the other, or even any standard. Everyone just makes up their own damn standard and the user has no choice but to wrestle them all down. Here, maybe it *would* make some sense to bring in ideas from the Aqua guidelines, or for that matter the Windows guidelines, the classic Mac guidelines, or hell anything else -- just pick *anything* and implement it *consistently*. But of course this has never happened and at this point I don't expect it to ever come together, short of a miracle in say RedHat's effort to merge KDE & Gnome. More power to 'em I say.
Anyway, I think what you really want is for someone to approach this as a true & complete discipline, just as programming & QA & administration are all disciplines. We need system designers that understand general UI theory (including general design principles, user testing & feedback schemes, etc) as well as specific implementations of the general theory as seen in e.g. Aqua, Windows, web design [Jakob Nielsen type stuff], etc. But in the end this all just has to be source material, and short of adopting someone else's standards full out -- that'll never happen -- in the end a cohesive Linux/X11 UI standard needs to emerge. Gnome & KDE & similar projects will play into this of course, but even those aren't fleshed out enough and the pointless rift between the two projects doesn't help things anyway. As long as there continues not to be a well thought out Linux/X11 HIG document that is widely referred to & implemented, using Linux will continue to be a painful experience for average [read: non-geek] users.
But then we all know that already, don't we?
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