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OpenOffice 3.1 Released
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu May 07, 2009 12:09 PM
from the what-a-strange-topic-icon dept.
from the what-a-strange-topic-icon dept.
harmonise writes "OpenOffice 3.1 has been released. According to the release announcement, this update received 'The biggest single change (half a million lines of code!) and the most
visible is the major revamp of OpenOffice.org on-screen graphics.' See the OpenOffice 3.1 New Features page for a full list of changes."
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Technology: OpenOffice UI Design Proposals Published 252 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Various members of the OpenOffice.org community have been submitting their first revisions of proposals to the OpenOffice.org Call for Design Proposals to redesign the user interface of Open Office. As part of Project Renaissance, attention is being drawn to the OpenOffice user interface, and it's 'user-friendliness.' Among the designs, is FLUX UI, which won an award at the Sun Microsystems Community Innovation Awards Program. Anyone can, and is encouraged, to check out the proposals (scroll to bottom of page) and leave your comments so that the designers can improve their designs for the final deadline for proposal submissions to the community."
[+]
Technology: Preview the Office 2007 Ribbon-Like UI Floated For OpenOffice.Org 617 comments
recoiledsnake writes "OpenOffice.org has prototyped a new UI that radically changes the current OO.o interface into something very similar to the new ribbon style menus that Office 2007 introduced and which have been extensively used throughout Windows 7. The blog shows a screenshot of the prototype in Impress (the equivalent of PowerPoint), but this UI is proposed to be used across all OO.o applications. Some commenters on the Sun blog are not happy about OO.o blindly aping Office 2007, and feel that the ribbon UI may be out of place in non-Windows operating systems."
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antialiased! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:antialiased! (Score:5, Informative)
The new anti-aliasing feature is on the graphics (charts, etc). The text in writer has been anti-aliased for years, ass.
Parent
Re:antialiased! (Score:5, Insightful)
It actually is a big deal that they did this, and I congratulate the developers on their good work.
Parent
Will be include in F11 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Will be include in F11 (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
What, half a million lines of code changed... (Score:5, Funny)
and still no Clippy the paperclip to help me write a letter?
Re:What, half a million lines of code changed... (Score:5, Funny)
"I see that you're writing a document that will undoubtedly take up more than one page. Would you like help affixing these multiple pages together?"
Parent
.5 million lines of code (Score:5, Insightful)
Having a lot of lines of code is not necessarily something to brag about. In fact, it's more likely to be an indicator of badness than goodness.
If the product works great, people won't care how many lines of code it has. If it's buggy or sluggish or in other ways wonky, people might look at the code line count and point to that as the problem. ("It's bloated!" "It's so big no one can understand it or fix it!")
Re:.5 million lines of code (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:.5 million lines of code (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of lines of code CAN mean exactly what you say, bloat. However it appears that in this case many of the line changes were fixing issues and adding needed features.
For example, they significantly reduced some bottlenecks in Calc... they made Base more like access in that you can actually create an "application"... and they added some very nice contextual help in places where non-power users will find it very handy, like when they are trying to use a Calc function and can't remember the order of its arguements.
I would say that this is a decent point release for the OOorg team, evolutionary but not revolutionary. My only complaint is how much it is beginning to resemble MS Office; nice for adoption rates, bad for innovation.
Parent
Re:.5 million lines of code (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, shucks. Apparently, neither of the NetBSD advocates are reading slashdot at the moment.
Parent
Congratulations (Score:5, Insightful)
Screw the naysayers, congratulations to everybody working in OpenOffice.org
Re:Congratulations (Score:4, Funny)
All hot female naysayers, 18-36 please report to my house.
Parent
Re:Congratulations (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Improved looks? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have heard for a long time how horrible OOo looked. Personally, I never understood what the problem was. The icons were clear and easy to dostinguosh between them, and the text-buttons were obvious.
Compared to the newest version of MS Office, I'd say that any version of OOo wins hands down.
Re:Improved looks? (Score:4, Interesting)
Especially compared to MS Office 2007. It took me about 5 minutes just to figure out how to print something. I mean, it's an office program. There should either be a big PRINT button, or a File->Print menu.
And ideally, a talking paperclip to help you stab your eyes out.
Parent
Re:Improved looks? (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of icons and menus is so that you don't need to know cryptic keyboard commands. If the preferred solution to the updated icon system is to use the keyboard, they've failed. If the system is so changed that experienced Office users can't find the things they always did in the old version and there is no simple help for "how do I do x", they've failed. (It took me 30 minutes to just see the macro ribbon in Excel the first time. Now I just use Alt-F11 if it's not on the system I'm using.)
Or to put it another way: The Ribbon system reminds me of the MacBook Wheel [theonion.com] - everything you want to do is just a few hundred clicks away.
Parent
Looks native (Score:5, Funny)
but it has had times where it seemed out of place on either Windows or OSX
And that's exactly why iTunes has been such a success on Windows. It looks just like a native app...
Parent
OpenOffice.org (Score:3, Interesting)
it has had times where it seemed out of place on either Windows or OSX (particular OSX before it was a native application).
I use NeoOffice [neooffice.org] on my Mac and see no reason to switch right now.
when I'm using a program and I can tell it wasn't designed for the system I'm running it on, I count that as a problem.
What matters to me is whether it is and how much it's usable. That's one reason I won't switch for now, NeoOffice is quite usable. Then again I hardly use it.
Falcon
Re:Improved looks? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Word count (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Word count (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know, but if you msg the developers I'm sure they would give it full attention. I see here that someone in 2006 [blogspot.com] wrote a Macro to perform such a task.
Parent
Re:Word count (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Word count (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Anti-Aliasing! (Score:5, Funny)
WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!!!!!!!
Re:Anti-Aliasing! (Score:4, Funny)
Shut up, Terry.
Parent
go-oo.org (Score:3, Informative)
Personally, I am waiting for go-oo.org 3.1, as that is what goes into Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Gentoo and others.
Won't download to my mac... (Score:3, Interesting)
I get some weird "download chooser" page, and if I select MacOSX from there, it won't download either. This is with Safari 4.
I think somebody is trying to be too "smart".
Re:Won't download to my mac... (Score:5, Informative)
I checked the full file list from the path to the Windows download and the Mac version isn't there yet - just the SDK. Checking the mirrors now.
http://openoffice.mirrors.tds.net/pub/openoffice/stable/3.1.0/ [tds.net]
JG
Parent
Well, Duh! (Score:5, Funny)
Well, Duh! I'll bet the least visible is the off screen graphics.
Most important question (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Most important question (Score:5, Informative)
FYI ODF 1.2 still hasn't even been finalised yet, so you can't really blame Microsoft for not yet implementing it until its finished.
Parent
500,000 changed lines of code (Score:4, Insightful)
So someone decided to run a code tidying tool and dared to check in the results I guess?
OO still has one major bug (Score:4, Interesting)
They still haven't fixed what I regard as the biggest bug in OO: the fact that file-opening and -saving dialogues default to the last directory it used rather than the current working directory when running on GNU/Linux. It is understandable that OO would use the MS Windows convention when running on MS Windows, but importing those conventions into Unix is a bad user-interface practice. There's a reason that Unix people move from directory to directory. For experienced Unix users who use different directories for different projects, the failure to track the current directory is very irritating.
Even if they feel it necessary to provide the option of using the MS Windows conventions for people switching from MS Windows to Unix, it should be an option, not a requirement. And I doubt that this would be hard to do: determining the default directory for those dialogues is presumably only done in one or two places and should be very simple to code.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It uses themeable widgets so it only looks ugly if you whole desktop does.
Re:Sorry but... (Score:5, Funny)
You had me until "Microsoft"...
Parent
sod off dancing monkey boy ! (Score:5, Funny)
Dancing Monkeyboy [google.com]
Parent
Re:sod off dancing monkey boy ! (Score:4, Insightful)
What a disturbing video.
In fact it descibes Microsoft...
1- The guy is incredibly unfit.
2- His face had the alpha male 'kill' look. (rather than a 'excited, happy, proud' look)
3- His actions looked like a gorilla defending its turf.
4- His first words were slightly xenaphobic.
now I understand the throwing chairs thing...
Parent
Re:Sorry but... (Score:4, Funny)
OpenOrifice is still just a lame piece of software for people who are too cheap to buy quality Microsoft software.
I didn't know Microsoft was in that business..
Parent
Re:Sorry but... (Score:5, Informative)
MS Office/Excel won't open two files of the same name, and insists on only one working window, forcing the user to "split" in order to compare spreadsheets. OO Calc does both.
OO Writer has a button for generating PDFs sans any Adobe integration.
The advantage to MS Office is that your client is more than likely authoring documents on an MS Office product, and absolute compatibility is not assured. But I don't fault the OO developers for that.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Free isn't even the correct English word for 'free of charge'
Sorry to pick on you grammer nazi but if your going to do it right you should follow your own advice look it up...
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/free%5B1%5D [merriam-webster.com]
See number 10 'not costing or charging anything'
That is FREE as in *NO* cost. There are other meanings of free, not just your narrow minded ones. I am with the original guy if I had a choice between OO and MS Office for free as in no cost (which he apparently has). It is not even
Re:Sorry but... (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry to pick on you grammer nazi but if your going to do it right you should follow your own advice
Yes, "YOUR" right his "GRAMMER" was teh sux, also while we're at it when you say you could care less you imply that you do care about the issue, as you have the ability to care less than you currently do about it.
Get a brane, moran!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sorry but... (Score:4, Insightful)
The phrase "gratis of charge" is redundant. "Gratis" suffices, although it has the unfortunate side effect of making you sound like a pretentious scholar that likes to toss around latin words that nobody knows.
Parent
Re:Sorry but... (Score:5, Funny)
And Windows is free if your time and money have no value.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Forgive me, but I am a bit ignorant on this, could someone tell me when and how it came to pass that Oracle now has relationship with Open Office?
You mean other than the fact that they own Sun and the OOo team is mostly Sun engineers? Yeah that was a pretty difficult one to solve.
Re:Oracle? (Score:5, Informative)
Technically, at this time oracle does not own sun.
They have announced that they will purchase them and the sale is pending, but until that time the two companies are totally independent and functionally must continue to operate as such.
So sometime this summer the oracle logo will be correct, but currently it is wrong.
Parent
Re:Great for Home / School use but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why on earth are business people doing statistics in an office suite rather than in a real statistical package?
Parent
Re:Great for Home / School use but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Great for Home / School use but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent