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....
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.