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."

Comments

It's not shiney enough.

[scenestar]

sure, it might enhance productivity, but if you want an MSFT office killer you need the pretty visuals to win people over.

Re:It's not shiney enough.

[Coryoth]

sure, it might enhance productivity, but if you want an MSFT office killer you need the pretty visuals to win people over.

What you need is "can't live without it once you've used it" features that aren't available elsewhere. I would have to say, after reading through his PDF submission, that, at the very least, there is the beginnings of a much more overview and workflow oriented approach to working with office documents that could be exceptionally powerful. Yes it needs to be implemented well and have decent scope. Ideally some manner of workflow view for an entire corpus of related documents - reports, spreadsheets, presentations, the lot - would be ideal. It takes a little imagination to see the full possibilities, but I think they really might be on to something here, and I am keen to see the final results.

Jedidiah.

Re:It's not shiney enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about pretty versus functional, it's about immediate satisfaction versus long-term gain.

The quality of a search engine is immediately apparent. You either find what you are looking for or you don't.

The productivity of an office suite isn't immediately apparent. If it saves you a few hours per month, then the average person won't notice.

The prettiness of an office suite, on the other hand, is immediately apparent. The average person can load it up and go "ooh" or "ugh" straight away.

The OP's point stands: it's not about who's better, it's about who can impress the average end-user immediately. In the case of office suites, this is manifested as "prettiness wins". In the case of search engines, this is manifested as "relevant results win".

Re:It's not shiney enough.

[biglig2]

No, it's because when a serious bank, warehouse, or whatever finds an application that works, they leave it the hell alone. Suppose they do an upgrade. One of two things will happen:
1) New version still works, and looks nicer.
2) New version no longer works.

The benfits on 1 do not outway the disaster of 2.

Check it out

[Life700MB]

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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Re:Check it out

[vux984]

Its a pity KOffice only runs on *nixes (afaik).

OpenOffice runs on Windows and OS X.

Given most computers run on Windows, that translates to more coverage. You want to slingshot KOffice into the limelight with OO.org port it to Windows.

It would also help Mass., with its ODF migration.

Re:Check it out

[SirTalon42]

KOffice 2.0 (to be released for KDE4) will be able to run natively on X11, Windows, and OS X (no X server layer on OS X I believe).

Re:Check it out

[SirTalon42]

The cygwin port of KDE is dead. KDE 4 is using the native windows version of Qt 4 (Qt4 is GPL on all platforms).

The actual proposal

[Kadin2048]

If anyone else was looking for the guy's actual proposal that was submitted to the competition, this is it:

http://www.koffice.org/competition/gui1results/mar tin_pfeiffer.pdf

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.

Re:The actual proposal

[critter_hunter]

StarOffice 5 (and possibly other versions) had an internal desktop and it was mind-numbingly useless.

uhgg

[Aqua OS X]

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?

Re:uhgg

[fossa]

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...

Re:Koffice only has one disadvantage

[Carewolf]

Ofcourse it supports exporting to PDF; all KDE applications does. You just press print and use the PDF printer.

Importing .doc is however notiously difficult, and KWord only does so in limited ways.

We want verifiable results

[bogaboga]

Those folks at KDE/KOffice actually listen to user input or criticisms. That's good. So I'd like them to solve this issue once and for all.

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.

Re:We want verifiable results

[pembo13]

I do not think I understand your "wish" properly. Fonts aren't a problem for me, but I know this does mean that there is no problem. Could you better explain?

What I'd like

[reason]

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?

Congratulations,

[santaliqueur]

I hope they give him a free copy for winning.

The sorry state of Open Source user interfaces

[jackjansen]

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.

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 /. 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).

Re:The sorry state of Open Source user interfaces

[QuantumG]

This is a problem with the whole industry, not just Open Source.

Re:Koffice only has one disadvantage

[diegocgteleline.es]

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.

Some difference from iWorks??!

[hotfireball]

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?..

Call it sour grapes...

[Overly Critical Guy]

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.