Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice.org Design Contest
lisah writes, "OpenOffice.org, along with co-sponsor WorldLabel.com, will give away more then $5,000 in cash and prizes to the winners of a template and clip-art design contest scheduled to run until October 13, 2006. Organizers are looking for original designs that are useful to multiple users but, in terms of creativity, they say the sky's the limit. Submissions can range from budgeting spreadsheets and personal finance templates to funky graphics and presentation templates, but must run on one of the suite's four main applications: Writer, Calc, Draw, or Impress."
>You're either good technically or a good artist. Not both. That's the way it's always been.
One technology that I've actually seen bridging that gap, is Rails.
I thought Rails was just hype until I saw creative types, people who would normally hire programmers or whoever, taking ideas from start to finish on their own.
For all the things that were supposed to do exactly that (going as far back as COBOL), the first one I've seen actually *doing* it, was Rails. It's both exciting and a little scary to see people taking their ideas from concept to revenue stream (or whatever), without much fuss at all. (Yeah, I know, Rails is "opinionated", but its opinion is that you should be doing web-based apps targeted at modern browsers. It happens to have had quite good timing for a language with such opinons.)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
How will they stop people just ripping off some of the templates from MS Office, obfuscating them slightly, and then submitting them?
There's an MS office template for most things, so the submissions will most likely either be:
a) a copy of something MS already has, or
b) obscure enough to be only of use to a very small group of people....
The actual announcement is here. Its got all the details on licensing (LGPL), prizes, criteria (originality, usability, artisitc merit etc)
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
Does Ascii art count?
If so, here is my submission:
O P E N
F
F
I
C
E
Catchy, aint it.
Table-ized A.I.
Noooooo! Don't cross the streams!
> You're either good technically or a good artist. Not both. That's the way it's always been.
Totally. Leonardo Da Vinci was a no talent hack of an artist and a pathetic technologist.
The goatse man with a spreadsheet emerging from...well....not a cell I would go into...
Monstar L
The visit of this site is compulsory: http://www.no-spec.com/
I don't know about that. As a visual effects artist, a lot of my work is highly technical - but I only make money because of a highly developed sense of aesthetics. In my field at least, the line between "operators"(geeks) and "artists" grows thinner everyday.
-Steve http://www.stevennicholson.com
...but what about the countless other sources of graphics and pictures which may be proprietory/copyrighted? What's preventing anyone from taking one and submitting it. I'd imagine the potential nightmare of lawsuits and litigation to follow if even one picture is caught. And who takes THAT liability?
How many Leonardo Da Vinci types do you know in real life? The guy was a one off genius.
I would much prefer *faster startup* of bloody thing then millions of templates and clipart inside.
839*929
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Damnd I misread.... I guess the Clippy design contest will be a long time coming.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Grrrrr, its "more THAN" not "more then". Encourage others to get it right by using the right phrase yourself.
This is one of those things that people take for granted, but they come in very handy when you need them.
As a licensed Office user, you can pull down literally thousands (probably closer to 100,000) various types of clip art, stock photography, and templates. There's probably 20 different Invoice templates alone, all very good.
And with Office 2003, opening a template from the web or adding clip art is all integrated into the application.
Little things like this will help OO become more mainstream, but I think it still has a long way to go.
-David
Who give a flying %&$£ about art if the functionality is stuffed.
... why, lots and lots of *them* of course... try the same tag-line with Windows Vista, think it will make a difference, or retrospectively with XP ... or Enligthenment ... or many superflous peripherals .. the list goes on.
who?
"So what if it doesnt work, it sure looks puurdy"
They should pay more attention to the interface first and get a good usability specialist. Basic thing are much harder to do than they should be, like there is no keyboard shortcut for automatic sum in Calc! After googling I found out that you actually need to create a macro to do that. Maybe this one was fixed in the most recent releases (haven't checked), but there MANY things like that they should focus on.
There are many artistic style, and clipart on many subjects and ideas in varying modern design styles (this this shitty hype web two.null style) as well as 60's comic style, smooth style, business style.
Too many nay sayers, who seem to think that everything has already been done. Still, at least the top post wasn't 'OMFG you asshats you fkking didn't proof-read the post OMFGFDFFFFJFKJFKJFJ!!!!!!1111111'
Wednesday! (for most)
please type the word in this image: stands verification text - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
You're either good technically or a good artist. Not both. That's the way it's always been.
.haeger
I'd say this guy would disagree with you. Just to name one.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
If you actually need to know what the program will do with your input, then all WYSINWYG (what you see is not what you get) programs are off. I became frustrated with wordprocessors because of the inability to do many things with them which I viewed as essential, and as a result switched to LaTeX. Although it might look daunting to the beginner, I found that it was easy to learn, and as opposed to wordprocessors actually gives you decent looking output. I've tried working with LyX as well, but it has the same problems as other wordprocessors, although the documentation is better. Nowadays I only use Open Office for viewing files others send me that require the use of such things such as a wordprocessor etcetera. The only exception might be Calc, but still, in general there is something amiss with the functionality of spreadsheets. Something just does not work right when trying to enter data, and Open Office is no different from Excel in this regard. Also, again, this applies to both, I do find that it's very hard to discover how to use certain tricks, for example, locking in view the first column or row. This is of course no problem for people who use it at a daily base, but if you use it actively once every three months like I do it's problematic. The documentation is also on par with Micro$oft's, and thus it's far easier to use some core utils since, even when I don't remember anything about the use, which happens often since I don't use those on a daily base either, at least the documentation is such that it's possible to find out how to do it.
as long as they don't support natively SVG.
SVG is the best standard for vectorial cliparts, and not supporting svg is really a shame. Bring real svg support to openoffice instead of the lame sun-java-only plugin, and then people will bring cliparts to openoffice.
How about MLA, APA, Tirabian and Chicago Templates.
...I wish that they had got people to design a better UI for the main app though, it just looks so much like it was designed on the cheap in 1997 ( see http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/17/Nt3_ 51-word97.png ). I know that people will say functionality should take precedence but I will not be able to convince anyone who is a casual user to switch when they will be presented with a mass of grey and cheap looking icons.
I hope that they have some money saved back to do that soon.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
You're either good technically or a good artist. Not both. That's the way it's always been.
Wrong.
I'd even go so far and say you won't excel at either if your not good in the other. I'm a professional software developer and a multimedia designer with a diploma in arts. I'd say I'm quite good at both *and* I'm aware that both are hard work and I also know the difference between crappy programming and good programming and the difference between crappy design and good design.
The problem with being at home in both areas is that you have to force yourself on one field of expertise at a time. Right now I'm doing a project where I only do the programming side. It's wonderfull having a designer do the neat looking stuff at the frontend without me having to worry zilch about it. Especially if he's doing a good job - which he is. Not having to explain to fellow programmers that it's important that your webappp doesn't look like shit is a big bonus aswell. The other way around, the desinger doesn't know very much about programming, so I have to tell him that mixing template stuff with haphazard logic the templates provide is a bad idea - and he doesn't get it all the time. Which can be anoying.
Again, it's difficult to handle both areas at once, but in the long run you come out on top, no matter what field you focus on. MM Designers who don't know programming are a pain in the upper leagues and so are programmers who don't know nothing about design. Steve Jobs is a good example of a guy who knows his way around technical stuff and pretty design quite well. And AFAICT he's getting along.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Charles Wyble System Engineer
That depends on your definition of good. In general you will see that the top artists don't have the time to become a top-programmer. A top programmer will not spend day after day thinking about intricate details about his next sculpture. There are however lots of people that create both artwork and program, in all kinds of varieties.
You have a long way to go. Clipart is the least of your problems: there is always images.google.com. I never really used MS Office much. I used Novel, and then Corel Office. When I moved to Linux I picked you up OO.org. You meet most of my tasks, and I have never had to open MS Word due to a a lack of yours. However, you are lacking a lot of useful features. Please copy features from Wordperfect. I would love a grammar checker as useful as the one in Wordperfect.
And I hear you don't have native SVG support? What's up with that?
Thank you.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I'm sure Leonardo da Vinci would have agreed with you...
I don't have one
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Wait until Gates hears about this. He will then offer $5,000,000 for whoever brings him the best plan of getting rid of Open Source fanatics :-D
-- You must be yay-high to rule the world.
....forgotten in the contest rules .... talking paper clips are not allowed!
Yeah, who does that Da Vinci guy think he is?! Get in line with the rest of us!
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
You have no idea what you are talking about. Probably the most well known counterexample would be Leonardo DaVinci, who was accomplished not only technically, but artistically and in several other aspects as well (including being able to wad up horseshoes with his bare hands).
I'm no Leonardo, but I am similarly talented both artistically and technically. I don't "do" art a lot anymore, since I don't find the time, though I have been coaching my eldest daughter the last few years. She's 10, a year ahead in school, taking advanced classes and a straight-A student, and just sold her first commissioned piece. It won grand champion at the county fair and placed with a blue ribbon at the state fair. She's a bit ahead of me, as I sold my first piece (a logo for a car dealership) when I was 12 and won my first art show at 14. My logo was used for 25 years, and I still see it on the bumpers of probably 10% of the cars locally. I have been writing software since I was 10 years old (I am 37 now) and work now as a software engineer in telecomm. When I was a senior in high school, I applied and was accepted to both art colleges and engineering schools. I chose the engineering route (EE) mostly because I was more comfortable around the people. While I was in college, I made money on the side by selling T-shirt designs, doing logos for business cards, and working at the local newspaper doing advertising layout and design. I helped a buddy get his printing and sign business off the ground, and worked on the side doing his graphic art work until he could hire someone full time to do it. I've also done the layout and covers for two children's books, and the the cover design for one special-edition reprinting of a historical medical book, too many brochures and newsletter designs to count, one product label (for a health-food drink) and several sign designs and company logos.
One thing I enjoy very little though is doing "art" on the computer. I like to work with a pencil. PhotoShop, Illustrator, and CorelDraw just "get in my way", even with a tablet, and GIMP is even worse. I can't understand how other people can stand to use them, they just drive me nuts. I'll often work the design out on paper, then scan it in and rework it in software if that is needed (often, the scanned version is sufficient as-is).
I also firmly believe that anyone can learn to draw, though some have more natural talent for it than others. It is mostly about learning how to "see", and by that I mean "observe what is in front of you rather than what is in your head." Most of my effort in teaching my daughter involves exercises toward that end (I often force her to draw upside down, or with her left hand, both of which really slow you down and make you observe the shapes rather than the object).
When I was in college, one of the professors had us take that left brain/right brain test. My score was *exactly* in the middle. She said she had been giving the test for years and had *never* seen that happen -- but keep in mind, this was at an engineering school, so she had a self-selected sample.
Anyway, my point is that while the technical/artistic divide might be the "normal" situation, it is hardly a rule.
"I wish that they had got people to design a better UI for the main app though, it just looks so much like it was designed on the cheap in 1997"
..
You know something, when I read the opening comment I said to myself, standby for a mass of OO doesn't have 'feeture' comments that strangely get modded up. And straight off at number four is the above
was Re:clip art...
davecb5620@gmail.com
"as long as they don't support natively SVG"
Google on OO and feetures. Select random feeture. Post I like OO except it doesn't have 'X feeture' on Slashdot.
SVG-ready OpenOffice 2.0
was re Re:Openoffice doesn't deserve cliparts
davecb5620@gmail.com
M. C. Escher and Leanardo Da Vinci would also agree with you.
Great, now there's going to be 5k clip art images of sharks with laser beams on their heads and snakes on a plane. Here's to you, Mr. Open Office submitter dude.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
I like OO except for the lack of a good User Interface, the grey and cheep icons, no native SVG support, no keyboard shortcut for automatic sum in Calc, no propagate deleting of paragraphs, no visible page breaks, slow startup ...
davecb5620@gmail.com
how about designing a proper icon first?
It's open source and free and all that sugar that makes some people erect. However they are paying you $5000 to do it. Why not make the product semi-commercial and actually come up with a competitor for MS Office, instead of relying on hobbyists.
Nothing costs nothing
The usual oversight with these reactionary comments a la "OMG, Microsoft shouldn't work on the Vista UI while there are still so many bugs!!12"...
Programmers are generally not artists.
Artists are generally not programmers.
Don't worry, the developers will keep working on OOo.
Meanwhile, why not give some artists some work they can do?
Sorry if I'm harsh, but I've seen that kind of argument a million times by now, and the reason it's flawed is so super simple to understand that it's downright scary how often it's overlooked. Are you thinking their software designers start rolling their thumbs as soon as some artist guys start working on fucking icons? Come on.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Indeed. I'm a sysadmin who finally persuaded my 50 users that M$ is out to get their money by changing document formats every few years, so they should try open source. Only to get burned when Open Office 1 cannot open documents created by Open Office 2. Now I look like an idiot and 50 timid users are scared back into the proprietary world. Maybe 10 years before they get brave again, if ever.
Stop trying to imitate everything we hate about M$ and just make a reliable product. Please!
Now, granted, my art stuff isn't quite as good as my little sister's stuff, but I think I'm working on it and getting better. (Sorry I don't have any scans of stuff from my current art class or anything - and if you go browsing the Scraps hard enough, you'll find some stuff at least three years old, but whatever).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Nerds lack a sense of irony, which is why you were modded down. However, you're actually partially right: Leonardo was a quite poor scientist and technologist.
Agreed. Although I'm working as a developer now, my last position was doing modeling and animation. There is a lot of artistic talent involved, but I would also consider it a technical position. Working on complex scenes in Maya, I know that I spent almost as much time writing MEL as rigging, and even when your not writing code it's still no walk in the park.
You hear a lot about the relationship between music and programming. You don't hear as much about the relationship between visual people and programming, but probably because all of the really talented people in those areas are out writing software. There is an asthetic to code as well, and I think most skilled developers are aware of it, at a conscious or unconcsious level.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
So they're going to rip-off Tufte instead of MS.
have to pay to use their software!
Waldemar Januszczak is an art critic who pumps himself up by writing scathing reviews of good artists. On /. he would be modded a troll. What's your point?
Is something burning?
Oh, it's my karma.
I would really like to have a _much_ better alternative to the pink 'n' purple graphs that are standard in MS office (and gnumeric). Who ever thought that putting purple and pink on a grey background get nice looking figures. Please, please, please, I am begging someone with a better understanding of layout to get a better set of standard colors.
You did shoot yourself in the foot because OOo 1.1.5 can read OOo 2.0 format. Also, since 2.0 is free, there is no monetary barrier to simply updating to 2.0.
>>You're either good technically or a good artist. Not both. That's the way it's always been.
> I'd say this guy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci) would disagree with you. Just to name one.
Citing a single counterexample from centuries ago when OP claimed that such individuals are very rare proves OP's point, especially when your counterexample is one data point among six billion.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
The biggest complaint I've had from people I get using OpenOffice.Org is the lack of Impress templates. I hope "they" come up with some good ones because everybody knows that the 'bad' MS Power Point templates are causing brain damage.
zenray
Slashfilters can lick my nuts. Who are they to call 'my' computer-generated works of art "junk characters"! But, I suppose it is no use complaining right here. I'll show them junk characters!
___ ___ _ _ _ ___
| . \| __>| \ || |/ __>
| _/| _> | || |\__ \
|_| |___>|_\_||_|<___/
A community-oriented lyrics site
Leaving aside the debate over da Vinci, I think the idea that you can't be good both artistically and technically is daft. It's simply a numbers game: if 10% of the population is good at art, and 10% is good technically, then we would expect only 1% of the population to be good at both.
If we take those made up numbers and put them in context, that would mean around 1 in 5 people would have some talent at one or the other. However, only 1 in 20 of those talented people would be good at both. It's not that such people don't exist, simply that they are rare in comparison to those who are talented in only one of the two areas.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Or, as Msoft Word calls it, "Normal View." I've been pleading w/ the OO.o design team (via there bug/feature trackers) to implement this with no luck whatsoever.
It's an incredible waste of screen space (not to mention scrolling time) to display each and every page with its headers&footers, not to mention the blank background between pages. When you're writing and editing the content of a document, all you want or need to see is the text itself. Page formatting comes later.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
p.s. My sig points to one of my drawings on my deviantart page.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
You're either good technically or a good artist. Not both. That's the way it's always been.
People have paid me to draw their portrait, others to write them bits of code... I'm also nearly ambidextrous.
Would you like to make a comment about how people are either good with their left hand, or their right hand. Not Both, and how that's always been?
You can't take the sky from me...
http://www.gimp.org/contest/
Why don't they spend some money and buy the rights to call themselves "Open Office"? This "OpenOffice.org" stuff is really awkward.
...Perhaps some halfway decent toolbar icons. I know Ximian have made an attempt in that direction, and there are other measures available (e.g. at kde-look.org) but it shouldn't need so much effort to make these less ugly.
What they should do is not only offer free clipart on a site like openclipart.org, but also offer it in a format that would be easily downloadable and usable not only by their own users, but also users of Micro$oft Orifice. Let the M$ zombies come to their site and see what they've got, then take a look at a free office application on the site, and maybe some of these people will then be converted over,... Plus, once they get a critical mass of software clipart, and if it's good enough, they could easily put a bunch of it on a CD-ROM and sell it in stores like wal-mart,...
Da Vinci's a great counter-example, but it's a shame that people can't come up with any others. There are many:
Alexander Borodin was a Russian composer and a very good chemist.
Charles Kavalovski is a tenured professor of physics and the former principal horn of the BSO.
I've seen examples of naturalists who were very good at drawing wildlife and plants and also had deep knowledge of their subjects.
etc. etc. etc.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
See my previous post #16147216. A combination of technical skill and artistic skill is not that much rarer than either one alone. How many people have Leonardo's technical ability alone, much less both?
I have (like Charles Kavalovski, alas not quite at his level) some talent for playing the French Horn. I'm also fairly capable in math and science. The fact that a lot of people quickly jumped on Da Vinci is not a proof of anything except that he is widely known for having such of range of abilities.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Is there a commercial or free replacement for Entourage that does email and calendaring, interfaces with Exchange server, etc.
(what is this, tech support? sorry, bogarted your thread because it was near the top and slashdot commenters are faster, funnier, and know too much... I need help)
Many posters note that fixing the poor UI as more important then clipart.
....
But what is a good UI ? Perfect for slashpol
Category
Graphs - genera
Graphs - axis
The math is a lot like the ask an audience feature in do u want 2b a millioniare.
if there is a consensus you will get a set of votes x + y, where x is the preferred soluiton and Y is the sum of the unpreferred, and all of the components of y are small (the math is really clear with 4 choices)
the only problem is if the better solutions are not well know, eg I really like the layout of graphs in Kaleidagraph, which few people know about.
Is that the SVG plugin that crashes on pretty much every image?
(oh, and with a long-winded registration process for reporting bugs, so don't expect much improvement)
It's all a matter of definition. I was pretty vague in my original post. Of course there are multi-talented people, but they are rare. (But to be honest, I was playing more of a devil's advocate role, as I like both art and math/cs, not that I think I'm terribly talented in either)