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Sneak Preview of New OpenOffice 3.2
omlx writes 'The last developer milestone (DEV300m60) of OpenOffice.org has been released. The next version of OpenOffice.org 3.2 has more than 42 features and 167 enhancements . The final version is expected to be available at the end of November 2009. Many companies have contributed to this version, like RedHat, RedFlag and IBM, making OpenOffice more stable and useful. I couldn't stop myself from seeing new features and enjoying them. So I downloaded the DEV300m60 version. After playing with it for many days I could say that OpenOffice developers have done very good work in it. Well done!"
5 characters isn't much to bruteforce anyway.
I suspect they eliminated a password length requirement because the security of the password is really up to the needs and desires of the user who set that password. If I have a password length of 5, then someone who wants a trivial password to keep casual lookie-loos out is going to choose 12345 anyway.
("Amazing! That's the same as the combination on my suitcase!")
Allow me to choose one character minimum and I'll choose one character and use it. No real loss in security, and since I'm choosing the level of security it's my decision to make. I can't sue OO for "lack of security" because OO is simply allowing me to choose how secure I want my stuff.
Someone who wants to protect (as in really protect) their document is going to choose a 50-character password with a mix of uppers, lowers, numbers, and scrunchy special characters. Then it'll be so secure, even the original author can't open it.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I evaluated 3.1 for use in my company for a department of about 100 people (would have saved $20,000 per year in licensing). The main problem was not speed but compatibility!
Please concentrate on fixing the problems with fonts/formatting!
I evaluated 3.1 for use in my company for a department of about 100 people (would have saved $20,000 per year in licensing). The main problem was not speed but compatibility!
It is as compatible as different versions of MS Office... You are only totally compatible when everyone is running the same version of the same program.
The problem is, Office tends to be 'compatible enough', certainly to the point where most people don't think twice about which version a .doc is created in when they open it.
OpenOffice has yet to reach that threshold.
OpenOffice, like Word and everything else I can think of, gets
one fundamental thing wrong in the user interface design.
Documents are 8 1/2" wide x 11" tall with say 6.5" x 9" tall
useable writing area.
Screens are not very tall, but quite wide these days, on average.
Therefore, all (yes, ALL!) of the available vertical space in the application
window should be devoted to displaying the document.
There is plenty of room for controls to the side, or perhaps sliding down
from the top on demand. A one-line control bar at the top might be
justified for inherently horizontal things like font and style names, but
that's it.
As it is, we are editing our documents through the letter slot in the door.
Maybe that will be version 4.0
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Any dialog box that has 'OK' instead of a meaningful verb as a button title is an automatic usability fail (this is one of the first things everyone learns about HCI, it's really not hard to get right...) so that quote alone tells me that OO.o is still not tackling usability issues properly. Someone has obviously looked at that dialog box, but not fixed the important issue with it, so the odds of them fixing the more serious issues is quite slim.
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Indeed, that is why, whatever package I am using, I always save as a PDF file in order to send to people. Sending files in a non-portable format is stupid. The most ridiculous thing I get is from work where other departments advertising meetings and Christmas events email out Publisher files.
I would agree with you, except that your range of motion tends to be greater left to right than it is forward and back. That means that it's easier to move your mouse along horizontal controls.
Rotating your screen solves the problem much better. You maintain the horizontal mouse-friendly controls and get more vertical viewing area.
An example I wrote about a few months ago:
Your example is wrong. It's *expected behaviour* that documents printed on different computer+printer combinations will look different. What's important - and what Word is designed to do - is make the hard output look like the screen. WYSIWYG means What You See Is What You Get, not What You See Is What They Get.
I think it just goes to show: if you have a document that absolutely must preserve formatting, send it as a PDF.
Exactly. If you want something that is guaranteed to look identical on someone else's screen (and printer) as it does on yours, then you want a program that's designed to do that - and Word is not.
the computational and storage requirements for editing and storing documents locally are trivial. Even the added cost of an SVN repo for off-site backup and sharing is trivial.
Online document editing can never be as fast and responsive as local editing.
There are severe issues with reliability, availability, security and accountability.
"The Cloud" is imbued with magical fairy dust and can solve all your problems, even the ones you didn't have. You just have to trust that the internet is a nice, safe place to keep all your important and private data.
I wrote my resume in Word 97. I needed to update it recently and found that it did not look correct at all in Office 2008. I was forced to use open office. After saving it as Office XP in open office it opened in Office 2008 just fine.
Your example is wrong. It's *expected behaviour* that documents printed on different computer+printer combinations will look different. What's important - and what Word is designed to do - is make the hard output look like the screen. WYSIWYG means What You See Is What You Get, not What You See Is What They Get.
A large part of this is that as part of the printing API, Windows allows applications to find out what printers are capable of. Word in particular takes full advantage of this, and renders documents according to what the default printer can do.
The Unix way, OTOH, expects the application to produce Postscript and it's the driver/printers' problem to render this appropriately on the page. Which, arguably, is the whole damn point of a printer driver
Any dialog box that has 'OK' instead of a meaningful verb as a button title is an automatic usability fail
No, it's perfectly valid in many dialogs, particularly confirmation dialogs and warning dialogs. "Warning: This operation can not be undone. [OK][Cancel]" is perfectly fine. "Continue" is too weak, sounds like an info screen. "Agree" or "Accept" sounds like you actually have a choice or that you're positively agreeing with it which you don't. "Ok" is intentionally netural, like "objection noted, but I'm still going forward with this". Granted, OK could have been used a lot less compared to useful verbs like "Save", "Connect", "Create" and so on but it's not that useless.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So, have they finally made OOBase useful for things like:
- import/export data to CSV files?
- The ability to query remote DBs and write the data into a local table?
- Done away with the compressed zip format that makes working with a few dozen/hundred MB of data impossible?
(I swear that nobody in the Open Office project truly understands Microsoft Access' strong points and why it is so hard to replace. MSAccess is a great glue program, allowing you to easily move data sets around, deal with ad-hoc databases, quickly look at a table, copy/paste to/from a spreadsheet.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Probably due to having a computer background. The ideal in typography is around 70, but I believe computer terminals standardized on 80 characters per line to account for shell prompts and such, so its common for us computer guys to use 80 characters instead of the sightly more legible 70.
Ever had to read a piece of text with 150+ characters per line? "painful" doesn't even begin to describe it. That's one of the biggest reasons I push for LaTeX over MSOffice or OpenOffice: it may not do as well as a professional typesetter, but it's considerably better than what 99% of people do 99% of the time using a modern office suite.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.