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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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