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KOffice GUI Competition Winner

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the community-makes-it-better dept.

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."

9 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. It's not shiney enough. by scenestar · · Score: 5, Funny

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

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  2. Check it out by Life700MB · · Score: 5, Insightful


    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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    1. Re:Check it out by vux984 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Check it out by SirTalon42 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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).

    3. Re:Check it out by SirTalon42 · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  3. The actual proposal by Kadin2048 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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  4. Re:Koffice only has one disadvantage by Carewolf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. The sorry state of Open Source user interfaces by jackjansen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

  6. Re:Koffice only has one disadvantage by diegocgteleline.es · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.