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KOffice GUI Competition Winner
Boudewijn Rempt writes "The KOffice GUI Competition has been won by Martin Pfeiffer. His entry was chosen from eighteen submissions by the jury because of its innovative, ground-breaking approach to workflow and document handling. Many submitters broke away from the beaten path and explored wild and wonderful ideas. The results page also has all submitted entries available for review."
sure, it might enhance productivity, but if you want an MSFT office killer you need the pretty visuals to win people over.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
It's a pity the real poor coverage KOffice gets in the web compared to OpenOffice, being a really cool suite with great programs. It deserves a lot of respect what are they doing.
--
Superb hosting 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95
the lack of filetype's suppported. It doesn't, I think support exporting to pdf, nor does it support .doc. This is it's only real drawbacks. Otherwise I am starting to like it better than OpenOffice especially because it has the office feature I wanted. tabs so I can have multiple documents open in one window at once. Which is what I want as otherwise I almost end up with several office windows open at once and it gets so cluttered.
If anyone else was looking for the guy's actual proposal that was submitted to the competition, this is it:
r tin_pfeiffer.pdf
http://www.koffice.org/competition/gui1results/ma
Frankly I think a lot of what he suggests strike me as rather "duh" concepts -- things which ought to be rather obvious but are ignored in some of the major office suites. I'm not sure how I feel about an application having a "desktop" which is separate from the actual OS' desktop; it seems like it would lead to a situation where every application has its own desktop, possibly with conflicting UI metaphors, and that's not a good end result for the user.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This is the first time I've heard of this contest. I would've been nice if they made an effort to publicize it within the industrial and graphic design communities (ie IDSA and AIGA for starters).
I can't say that I'm very impressed with the winner or any of the runner ups. The OS community should seize the opportunity to accept and leverage professional interactive design.
The commercial software industry doesn't do this very well... does it's make sense to exploit this weakness?
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I've noticed as well that the option is generally not listed when you look for exporting... but the KDE print system can "print" to a PDF file.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
The issue is to do with fonts. I'd like to have a situation where the entire KDE desktop respects fonts selected by the still missing font manager. Right now, we have two areas where fonts can be configured and these are not [neccessarily] respected by all KDE apps! A wish issue has already been submitted.
What are you talking about? There's one site that has purported KDE 4 "screenshots". Where are all these others you claim exist?
Not sure I agree with some of the ideas in the winning entry: most people don't want to work in full page view by default, for instance, since most of us are stuck with monitors and eyesight that make full-page view uncomfortable for reading.
What I'd really like to see is a tool to remember what documents are associated with different projects. When I'm working on my "river1" report, for instance, I want to have "river1 draft manuscript.doc", "river1 budget.xls" and "river1 project plan.doc" open for easy access, and Matlab up with the path set to the river1 directory. I should be able to do all this with a single click.
When I'm working on the "Lake Suchandsuch" project, I want to be able to open a different set of tools and documents with one click: perhaps a putty terminal connected to my high performance computer account, a gvim window with "buggy code.c" open, and a PDF of a scientific manuscript with details of the algorithm I am trying to implement. Does anyone know of a tool that can do this?
Love it or hate it, you have to be impressed with what they're doing.
Truly an American icon.
Yay innovation.
I hope they give him a free copy for winning.
I do not accept czechs.
Does "fucking loathe it" belong to "hate it"?
you're just mad because Konqueror let me get first post.
poor kid.
The comments to this article (so far) IMHO show why Open Source user interfaces are in such a bad shape: 90% is about some minor functionality that this-or-that package doesn't have, 9% is about graphics design. Only one post discusses the reason this submission won the contest: it proposes an innovative way to present your daily work.
/. posters with the open source community is a bit of a stretch:-) still doesn't get the point. It is not about how many thousand things your application can do, it is not about beautiful screen layouts, it is about enabling the end user to complete the task they have set themselves with the minimal amount of hassle (especially if s/he has done a similar thing many times before), and helping them with that task as much as possible (especially if s/he is doing something for the first time).
After 20+ years of research results that tell people what good user interface guidelines are, plus companies such as Apple that have products that more-or-less adhere to these guidelines, it seems that the open source community (I know, equating
There may be some useful ideas in there, but for a document proposing the future direction of a major piece of existing software goes, this is laughable: there are no references to user studies, feedback, or other kind of user-centered design in there; all this is based on is looking at Microsoft Office and a bit of navel gazing.
But 2006 will still be the year for desktop Linux. Right?
I thought these were great concepts myself:
r itz_zimmermann.pdf
http://www.koffice.org/competition/gui1results/mo
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
Try this.
Of Code And Men
Sorry for my blindness. But does somebody can point me the difference in the principle between this proposal and Apple iWorks already developed? I see the same style drawer, same page thumbnailer and so on. Currently I see worse iWorks clone, since iWorks/Pages2 offers you better working space since you use only the tools you need actually.
IMHO, @ KDE there was much better proposals than this one.
Am I missing something?..
...now where was that? Oh, yeah, Microsoft Word for Mac. Except they did it right. Despite what they claim in the article, floating palettes most certainly have been used in office apps.
Well, I agree that the internal desktop (and the MDI interface model in general) sucks, but is it a bad idea, or is it just an unworkable implementation of a good idea? The good points of the internal desktop were that the different document types could be made to work together in a fasion that the OS doesn't seem able to do (the office suite is able to get at the meta-data and internals of your documents, and facilitates good indexing and integration of the documents -- but the OS just shows you filename/type/size and a date). The bad points are that the "Office" desktop and the "Real/OS" desktop are as seperate from each other as the "Physical" desktop items that your computer sits upon. So if you have a document that isn't produced from one of the suite's programes, it becomes difficult to locate and use it in the office desktop. I would like to see the some of the ideas from SO5 and the winner's proposals migrate into the actual OS desktop. Unfortunately that would mean sharing meta-knowledge of the documents between the OS and the office apps, and would effectively end the cross-platform goals for KOffice and OOo.
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
I'm hugely disappointed; I sent my PDF entry to three email addresses, even contacted Ingwa on IRC for confirmation of receiving my entry, and it's still not shown on the results page. I wonder if they ever received it.
:-(
I don't know if my idea sucked or was plain and obvious, but it's a huge bummer it's not even on the results page for some reason, as though they never received it. Mine was an interface reorganization with an emphasis on a context-sensitive area to keep things familiar and free of clutter (first thing to go was that horrible toolbar).
I can't believe all this time I've been sitting here thinking they were reading it. I put a lot of work into it. I wonder what the heck happened.
Since it doesn't matter now, I offer it to Slashdot. Click here to read my entry in original PDF form if you want to check it out. Let me know what you think. It's nothing revolutionary, but it's not intended to be. These crazy experimental office interfaces are exactly what the user doesn't need.
Man, what a disappointment that they never even got it. Figures. But hey, I offer mine here as GPL too--if someone wants to use it for something, go right ahead.
"Sufferin' succotash."
After years and years of advancements in computing we still haven't been able to create a replacement for paper. Paper is still the best choice for taking notes, jotting down ideas, drawing things, etc., etc.
The reason is simple - you can put anything down (that you can with a writing implement) anywhere on a piece of paper. For example, you can start with drawing a sketch in the middle. Then putting down some annotating text and connecting them with arrows to the sketch. Perhaps you could make a detailed diagram of an especially complicated part at a corner. On the back of the sheet you can make some quick back of envelope calculations. After you are done, you can put the whole thing safely in your wallet.
Do we care about typefaces, point sizes, and that sort of thing? No. All those have nothing to do with the formation, recording, and refining of ideas. However a lot of time was spent on these features that should really belong on an end node down near the very bottom of the creative process.
using multiple desktops. Have a different desktop for each project you're working on, you can switch between them with 1 click.
Linux has had this for ages, and I think you can get it working with OS X and Windows too with some 3rd-party tools. You need a lot of RAM (or a big swap file and some patience), and good uptimes (since the desktop state doesn't survive reboots), but if you have that it's a killer feature for handling multiple projects.
I quit!
If you'd said "vi on a Sun3", you'd have had to trade the Funny modifier for Informative.
you had me at #!
It's interesting to check how these PDF proposals were created. I can usually find this out in Preview with Tools -> Get Info -> Details -> Content creator. David Metz, for example, wrote his proposal in Pages.
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its own quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its own quotation.
That argument is about as valid as saying that there should only be one text editor. Both KOffice and OO.o will be using OpenDoc as the native format. And since OpenDoc is actually open and not just a closed but "defacto" standard, the interoperability will be extremely good. So use whichever suite suits you.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
I totally agree. I avoid Gnome apps whenever I can for this exact reason. The File Chooser is absolutely shocking! I prefer the KDE File Chooser by far. Usually I type paths and filenames, with the aid of autocompletion. When I'm lazy I can point and click easily, and it just isn't a chore! Compared to the Gnome File Chooser... well, there is not comparison IMHO.
The Gnome File Chooser is what ticks me off about using Firefox. I wish I could use Firefox with the KDE's instead.
err
In gnome's file chooser...
You can start typing a file name (say you hae hundreds of files in a dir but you know the name) and the selector will jump to the file (or folder).
If you want to typoe the path just press / (which brings up the location box) and enter the location path of where you want to save / open and even that auto completes.
Learn about things before dissing them
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes. However open source is the one that's vying to be a replacement for closed-source. Not the other way around. A "problem" for OSS isn't the same thing as a "problem" for closed-source. One will drive people TO OSS, while the other will keep them were they are presently.
I know all about GNOME's file chooser and I hate its guts. Something that is ugly, doesn't allow you to sort, provides *no indication* that you're actually able to *type* a file you're trying to open (until it awkwardly displays a popup and then behaves unlike every other app on the planet in that its autocompletes actually *MOVE* the cursor forward to the end of the autocomplete rather than simply displaying it and letting you keep typing), etc deserves to burn in hell.
KDE's file chooser is just modelled on Windows 2000/XP, nothing innovative there.
Kexi runs natively under Windows since late 2003.
d ows
Try it out: http://www.kexi.pl/wiki/index.php/Kexi_for_MS_Win
jstaniek
>By my calculations, based on Godwin's law, this thread is likely to die quickly.
That is because you use Nazi techniques to do your calculations.
Neither one of them has to do with the gui.
One, a decent outlining function in the WP. Drag and drop of sections and auto renumbering.
Two, the functionality of Filemaker v4 in Kexi. That is, make up a form with calculation fields, forced choice from popup menu, drag and drop layouts - all the stuff that makes it possible for an ordinary user to do an application in FM in a half hour, and that will take him....how long in Kexi?
Do both of these, and it will be an absolute killer.
There is also a bit of an issue with the spreadsheet. A while ago I had to open one consisting of 2500 rows and about 40 columns. The only open source spreadsheet that would really handle it was OO. So they maybe need to look at performance issues on the spreadsheet. But for most refugees from Works, its probably fine as is.
Even though I may sound just like my fellow posts here, I wanted to drop you a comment.
/.ers and KDEians). Anyhow, kudos to you; you should submit those ideas to another project that is more willing to apply, well, functional clarity.
I must say that your PDF reads much like an Apple GUI guideline, and not like something intended for KDE. What I mean to say is that it shows how much you value functional clarity (perhaps too much so, in the eyes of
"Good news, everyone!"
The Gnome file chooser i do know, however. It *might* be innovative, i don't care, it *does* suck.
outway is my new favourite word of the deigh ;)
$
GNOME's file chooser is like some kind of UNIX from two decades ago, so how is that any better?
Those folks at KDE/KOffice actually listen to user input or criticisms.
That's exactly the problem - users don't know what they need - that's what interaction designers are for.
Improvements in productivity (significant ones, in any case) are rarely triggered by user input, and I think this is one of the main reasons linux desktop is still so far behind Windows and OS X (not trolling, I swear).
Isn't that Microsoft's own attitude you're borrowing there?
They're the ones that drone on and on (and on) about innovation, and we're the ones that don't use their stuff supposedly because it's crap or we just generaly don't like it.
So by your own reference you invalidate your arguement to the very crowd you're trying to appeal to.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
Heh, got me! One of the many perils of posting to Slashdot when in bed. (My gf can provide a lis tof the others if you like)
You know, for years I used to genuinely think that the word "outage" was actually spelt/pronounced "outrage".
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Not 100% true. I've had apps that were "pretty" but a whole lot less useful. In fact, quite often in many applications the prettiness (windows zooming around, animated icons, annoying bloody paperclips) gets in the way of the actual functionality.
For example, I've been reliving the "good ol' days" with ZSNes and GSnes (GSnes being a snes9x frontend). ZSnes has an interfaces which is independent of my windowing environment, so it doesn't get any of the fancy KDE/etc decorations etc. However, on closer investigation the menus are better laid out, and it performs better (uses GL acceleration, whereas the '9x openGL version has broken netplay).
All in all, between the two I'd rather choose the more usable/functional product, even if it isn't as "pretty." The same can be applied to OpenOffice, with part of the "usability" on an immediate basis being how close it is to MS Office for users who have been familiar with that product like.
Semi-OT, but I thought I'd pop it in as useful, since I'm surprised that KOffice can't open PDF (at least in read-only mode or something like that): you can open PDF or PostScript files in GIMP (I think it might require GhostScript, though). Useful if you receive PDF documents which you need to "sign" and "fax"... at least more useful than the "print, sign, re-scan, fax with faxmodem" method I used to use.
Still, I wish that there were a native KDE app that could handle adding/editing PDF's more natively, so that I could simply add a page signature as opposed to exporting each page to GIMP. Neither KOffice nor OO do that (and certainly MS-Office on windows does)
The Firefox devs have been refusing to implement the KDE filepicker in Firefox:
4 8
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2988
Those fall into three categories:
I ask again; where are all these sites that are supposed to have KDE 4 screenshots? I know one site made it to Slashdot with mislabelled mockups, but that's it. Where are all the others? No, Google searches filled with false positives don't count. Either post links to more than one site or rescind your baseless claim.