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Splashscreen for OpenOffice.org 2.0 Wanted
An anonymous reader writes "From the OOo site: 'OpenOffice.org 2.0 is coming fast and it needs a new splashscreen. You can help. Send us your best by 10 December and it might be seen on the desktops of tens upon tens of millions next year.' For more information, visit the OpenOffice.org website."
We need you to GIVE OUT CDs to friends.
We need you to DONATE MONEY (paypal button on openoffice.org).
We need you to BE VOCAL in your support of OpenOffice.org.
We need you to say "THANK YOU" to Sun Microsystems for donating all the code and their continual support of OpenOffice.org.
And a few friendly reminders. Open Office(tm) != OpenOffice.org.
And to kill the license trolls, we are LGPL.
(and I may get FP!)
Jason Faulkner
OOo RegiCon North America Webmaster
Jay | http://oldos.org
Splashscreen for OpenOffice.org 2.0 wanted?!
Splash screens are evil! They pop up in front of you, disabling you from doing what you were doing, and don't allow you to start doing what you started the app for. They are just a smoke screen for a badly done application.
The way to do it (assuming you're going to open a window) is to first open the window, so that the user sees the app is launching, and can position the window where he wants it. This prevents popping up a window at some unpredictable future time, which distracts and annoys users.
So what to do if your app takes a long time to load? First off, it shouldn't. You don't have to load all functionality at once, just in case the user might want it. You can load it on demand. Secondly, if loading still takes a long time, you can indicate loading progress in the window you created.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Just a rough outline here.
The Openoffice.org marketing site has more information about upcoming features in Openoffice.org 2.0.
I would also like to get feedback on if there would be interest in an ISO of the disk I give out. I would be more than willing to host it if there was interest.
You might wanna post details to dev@marketing.openoffice.org and/or cdrom@distribution.openoffice.org.
Jay | http://oldos.org
Splash screens suck.
I've been doing the same, but with a bit of a kiwi flavour. I'm quite keen to do a set of 'kiwiana' stamps for tuxpaint next edition (damn openoffice, next edition will have to be when OOo 2.0 comes out, I only just finished the last edition!)
http://zcat.wired.net.nz/kiaora/
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
I agreee completely. OpenOffice starts slowly enough that a splash screen does help indicate that it is really doing something, but honestly I'd rather not have to watch it. Often I start OpenOffice to open a MS word document that someone sent me in my mail and I'd rather keep reading my mail than have to watch the progress bar creep across (slow machine) the screen. Make it optional at least and make it easy to find the preference to turn it off (if there is one now I can't locate it).
One of the #1 goals in OpenOffice.org 2.0 was to increase speed.
Yes, we are a bit slow at times, but you also have to remember that we don't use OS hooks to help it load quicker. MSO, AbiWord, etc, all have integrated hooks to help it load faster (libs are already loaded).
Try a developer snapshot of OOo 2.0, and then decide.
Jay | http://oldos.org
And a few friendly reminders. Open Office(tm) != OpenOffice.org.
This doesn't remind me of anything. Are you just saying that "Open Office" is a product and "OpenOffice.org" is a website?
I am sure 90% of the people on this site know exactly what the vital distinction you're making is. But I do not.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
AFAIK, the product is called OpenOffice.org; IIRC this is because "Open Office" isn't a trademakable name (but I could be wrong). They asked people not to refer to it as "Open Office" a while back.
Allergy advice: Contains eggs.
I think that's the first time I've ever heard "OpenOffice" and "fast" used in the same sentence.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Could someone please design a splashscreen that is:
Every time I start OpenOffice.org, the huge splashscreen just sits there blocking the way of all my other apps. And it sits there for a LOOOooo...ng time! (Later I discovered that I could drag it out of the way by holding down Alt, but why should I have to?)
Even some translucency would be good so that I can at least see what's going on underneath the splash screen. And someone can design a logo for their new slogan: "OpenOffice.org --now only takes 60 seconds to load!"
Okay, okay, I shouldn't be so hard on the OOo team, since it *is* open-source. Please do take a look at some comments that I and other Slashdotters have made which I hope are being addressed. I recognize that some of these take time to work on, but the first step is to know that the items listed above are a significant incentive to switch to a lesser-developed program like AbiWord despite its inferior MSWord-importing capabilities (for example).
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Have they got ridden of that weird custom GUI-toolkit in 2.0 yet?
Real native look and feel (not just look) is my major #1 wish for OOo. Especially on OS X it feels extremly alien right now..
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
One thing that is lacking in OO is graphing abilities, which don't seem to be addressed in the 2.0 new feature list. Either an improvement to the rather low level of graphing ability that excel has or an easy way to export the data to something like gnuplot would be great.
We need you to GIVE OUT CDs to friends.
The Open CD is an excellent choice for giving to Windows users (however, they need to update to Firefox/Thunderbird instead of Mozilla for the next version).
I'm a bit disappointed with the 2.0 list, though. There were quite a few problems and issues that people have been discussing for OOo 2.0 that don't seem to have made it into 2.0.
Here are two things that come to my mind (because I keep running into them), but there were more:
There are a lot more rough edges, limitations, and problems that I think are pretty well know. For a 2.0 release, the set of changes actually given on that web site seem pretty modest (although I appreciate that better MS Office compatibility is probably a high-priority item and a lot of work).
The trademark for "OpenOffice" belongs to someone else.
.. a way to DISABLE THE FSCKING SPLASH SCREEN because all splash screens blow.
You say that ... We need you to DONATE MONEY (paypal button on openoffice.org)
One way of getting people to donate money may be to change the contribute page. At the moment it says "We strongly prefer that people become contributors. In most cases, being a contributor will go much further than a monetary donation. However, for those who cannot offer time, we would gladly accept a monetary donation to the project."
In the past, I've been put off of donating because of this message.
Training monkeys for world domination since 1439
no, it is trademarkable... the problem is that someone else already owns the trademark (though i don't recall who...). See the FAQ: http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/faq-other.html#10
[ you and I are ugly ]
The primary reason I turn it off, is because I don't want some static, always-on-top window blocking my view of other windows I'm working on. I don't mind programs taking time to load if they need it, just let me read something while it's waiting. In my case, programs rarely get opened up on their own.
Usually splash screens play nice, but they always seems to block something I'm looking at there and then. An about box will suffice if I really find out what I'm running.
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
I propose the one finger victory salute on the splashscreen. How can one go wrong with that? :D
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Oh, wait a sec, not everybody has switched to Mac OSX. I take it back. Do whatever. I'll use msoft until you get a real OSX version working.
Based upon the OO team's utter failure at building a usable UI (for the most important segment---the average, non-technical user who has been using MSO), I highly doubt there are that many people using it.
Yeah, right.
I've been using OOo and Firefox for a while now, but the one advantage Firefox seems to have is that due to its open nature, people such as Moox and mmoy have been building CPU optimised versions which boot in half the time and are generally much more responsive (I'm on Windows BTW).
The splash screen on OOo seems to be mostly there because it takes so long to load (relatively speaking of course) from scratch.
Does anyone know if there are CPU optimised versions out there like the optimised Firefox versions? That would certainly cut down on the need for a splash screen in the first place.
That said, I don't mind a splash screen as long as there is an option in Preferences NOT to use it.
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Live Clippy: http://crapdump.meepzorp.com/clippy/clippy.jpg This guy needs a new gig
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I plan on helping Open Office by ensuring people only use quality Microsoft Office products. ;-)
There are also WinLibre and GnuWinII if you don't like the application selection in TheOpenCD. And you can make your own compilation :-)
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The Open CD is an excellent choice for giving to Windows users (however, they need to update to Firefox/Thunderbird instead of Mozilla for the next version).
Better would be to include Firefox/Thunderbird in addition to, not instead of, the fantastically integrated Mozilla suite. Why deny them the opportunity to do all their common net tasks with one convenient application? I know I certainly appreciate not having to launch a seperate program just to read my mail.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
They do ICT work for offices, based on Linux and other free software. They distribute OpenOffice.org, among other things, but are completely unrelated to the OpenOffice.org project.
Jan
What do they want to appear on the splash screen? How do they expect people to design something without requirements? Have these people ever worked with designers?
I tried OOo in knoppix last year and was pleasantly surprised that someone had made the OOo splash screen into a regular window with a - what do you call it? - a window around it. You could drag it around, minimize it (I think), but most importantly it would go behind other windows so you could actually do other stuff while it loaded.
I dunno why that's not the default behaviour, but it would be nice if it was.
creation science book
You can disable the open office splash screen by editing the sofficerc file in the program directory.
/etc/openoffice or /opt/openoffice
Edit the Line
Logo=1
to Logo=0
This is probably located at
on most systems you do
locate sofficerc
to see where it is
Dont most programs kill their splash if you click on it?
Id have to test, but i know a lot do... If you get tired of watching, just click and *poof* its gone..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
while the user waits the OOo to load, s/he could use some small text editor / screen (with very, very limited feature set) to start typing, and the text would then be transferred to OOo writer / calc -whatever. Or... tetris-clone would be fine, too.
There happens to be several of us in the University/Scholastic segment that value OO for everything but Calc and their regression capabilities when compared to Excel. THis has been discussed OVER and OVER but the OO community views these issues are "features" or "non-essential" when they are THE most critical thing for the teacher/scientist/engineer in us. For example, see
s su e_id=366
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/showvotes.cgi?i
When they start seeing issues like this as essential and not a feature then I'll start giving them my $$. Until then, and because of their attitude on this, I will still use MSO on a limited basis and therefore not contribute. I contribute monetarily to other packages (Mozilla, PCLinuxOS, etc) that I use daily because they DO replace their competitors wholeheartedly. I choose to vote with my support or non-support.
After reading that OpenOffice.org 2.0 should have faster load times I installed it. Boy was I disappointed. The only thing faster was the installation. Load time was double of 1.1.3 if it even did load.
So OpenOffice.org 2.0 should have a splash screen to indicate what it's doing because it's so damn slow starting!
I thought English was open source.
HAR HAR! Shut up. OK.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
There are only two reasons for splash-images/screens to exist.
1) to give the user a feedback that the app is launching.
2) it looks beautiful
Both arguments however are flawed when it comes to experienced users.
1) should be handled uniformly by the application-manager and not require the app to do anything.
And 2) is actually reversed when you are starting multiple applications. This will create the look of tv-commercial interruptions, which, I think, nobody really consideres to be beautiful.