Re: [libreoffice-design] Design principles

2012/5/6 Stefan Knorr (Astron) <heinzlesspam@googlemail.com>

> Hello Mirek,
>
> great effort to do that! It seems to be based on Android's UI design
> principles... amiright?

They weren't really based on any principles. Though I've drawn inspiration
from some other companies' design principles, I wanted to craft my own.

> I'd like to comment on the goal of being "focused":
> "Focus on doing ONE thing well. Writer is for producing great-looking
> documents, Impress for supplementing a great speech, Calc for
> interpreting data. Additional features, like HTML controls for Writer,
> should be available to the user as extensions, not shipped with the
> product. Necessary features that aren't related to what the user is
> doing (e.g. "Quit", "Recent documents", "New file" in Writer) should
> be tucked away."
>
> While this is a laudable goal for some software, it's probably not a
> goal that's too helpful for LibO which currently is more of a jack of
> all trades and which has its strengths in being that.

Even an advanced office suite needs to be focused.
As I specified, I see Writer as a tool to create great-looking documents.
That doesn't mean it can't export to HTML -- of course it can. An HTML
document is just as valuable as an ODT document. What it does mean, though,
is that Writer's workflow needs to be concentrated at creating a
great-looking document. All the tools within Writer should help the user do
that.
If the user wants to create a website with Writer (which I wouldn't
recommend, as there are better tools for that), he can download an
extension to help him accomplish that.

For office productivity software, one of the important things are
> comparison tables. In these tables, things like "exports to HTML,"
> "support format XYZ," "can create organigrammes" all get you "points."
> So, that's where this project comes from: trying to match MSO in a
> comparison table + a little authentic innovation.

I guess we have very different ideas about what LibreOffice should be.
I'd like LibreOffice to stand its own, have value not as a Microsoft
alternative but as a powerful suite of applications that each has its
specific goal and meaning.

File format support is important, I agree, but it has no influence on how a
piece of software is designed.

Obviously, LibO has a number of rough areas, the further out you get,
> the rougher it is. Obviously, it should be more focused, for instance,
> there's no excuse to ship a scanner module (that's only usable from
> inside one of the applications anyway), because MS doesn't do that
> either.

Again, I'd prefer to judge LibreOffice on its own rather than compared to
MS Office.
The scanner module could actually be very useful if done correctly, perhaps
if included as a tab under the Insert image dialog.


> Then, you have your example of Form Controls – I _guess_ these are
> most often used for writing macros for LibreOffice, not for exporting
> to HTML.

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