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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."
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."
From what I understand of interaction design, it's hard work. You can't have a contest "design an interface" and be done with it. That might be a start, if the design is based on observation. The next step would be to start implementing and bring users in for testing early on; then change the design as needed and keep testing. The design must be an iterative process. This is of course difficult with software; many use patterns may not be visible in the short term so I imagine it's easy to draw the wrong conclusions from the observations...
The cygwin port of KDE is dead. KDE 4 is using the native windows version of Qt 4 (Qt4 is GPL on all platforms).