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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.
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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.
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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?
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Ofcourse it supports exporting to PDF; all KDE applications does. You just press print and use the PDF printer.
.doc is however notiously difficult, and KWord only does so in limited ways.
Importing
All kde programs, including koffice, can print to pdf. It's a function of the printing subsystem, not the app itself.
It's not as good as OO.org at opening word docs, but I just tried one someone emailed me and it opened up fine and I could get at the content.
Even better, they're standardizing on the OpenDocument format. Hopefully, the more folks use opendocument the fewer issues exchanging files between different office apps.
They'll think I've lost control again and leave it all to evolution. -- Supreme Being, Time Bandits
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.
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?
I hope they give him a free copy for winning.
I do not accept czechs.
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
Of course it supports exporting to PDF; all KDE applications does.
Actually, kword can open PDF files, which is something that openoffice still can't do AFAIK.
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?..
I've not used KDE's PDF printer, but since you get to it from the print menu, I'd think the result would be more similar to a PDF995 PDF than exporting straight to PDF using OpenOffice.
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.
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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.
I shall! It sounds like that PDF995 software has taken a very naive approach to PDF creation. Both Adobe's printer driver and the one available to KDE create proper PDF documents where the text remains as text. I just 'printed' the jsr 170 spec (something like 238 pages) from kpdf. The generated PDF was 1.6MB to the original 2.3MB, also the text in the generated file was still selectable.
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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
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