The Open Office Renaissance
OpenOffice.org is constantly criticised for having a complex and wrong user interface. The office suite’s UI is undergoing changes, though, through their recently-announced Project Renaissance, a plan to “create a User Interface so that OpenOffice.org becomes the users’ choice not only out of need, but also out of desire”. Stuart Langridge and Jono Bacon talk about what Renaissance means for OpenOffice.org and the open source desktop.
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First post!
Comedy.
Good “shot”.
I wasnt aware of this endeavor – I think they should be congratulated on it. I have to say I do like the look of the new interface, cant wait to see the end result
@mrben thats lame. It is slow to start up. The dictionary is bad too, like Irish local is the same as the GB local for spellings but we have to change the dictionary because it doesnt do it automatically. It is a great idea to reinvent it. I dont mind it being big as long as its easy to use. Redesigns are all the rage at the moment, google chrome is changing the way we do browsing, gnome-shell is going to redesign the Gnome desktop UI, so why not other applications? For doing cool stuff you can use Clutter, glade will never do anything outside the box. Oracle will drop open office id say because they cant make money from it.
I’ve been using Google Docs almost exclusively for several years now in academia, home life and at work. It has about 20% of the features of OpenOffice which is ample 80% of the time. Google Docs has the advantage of being much simpler to use and also it stores my data in the cloud.
Use cases which fall outside of that 80% are creating really nice looking presentations, carrying out complex formatting for documents (e.g. when I needed to format a paper to meet the formatting guidelines for a conference) and carrying out advanced spreadsheet functionality like complex charts. That’s when I use OpenOffice.
On the subject of UI mockup tools, UI design is a big part of my job and I’ve been frustrated with the lack of good tools. Jono’s right that something like Glade is too restrictive for designing anything innovative so I usually end up creating static mockups using Inkscape and writing a textual description of behaviour.
What would be much better would be a tool which gave a designer as much graphical design freedom as Inkscape but could also create an animated & semi-interactive mockup to give people an idea of behaviour. A great way of doing this would be to extend Inkscape to allow SVG animations and Javascript mouseovers/clicks etc. with a nice friendly authoring interface. These interactive mockups could then either be put in front of a user to try out with a limited set of use cases, or be used to quickly create concept videos to demonstrate proposed behaviour.
It strikes me that it could be pretty simple to create a tool that is essentially “Glade for usability designers” – just a simple Python app for embedding widgets. What could be cool is that if someone needs a custom widget, you could then just embed an image that looks like it, to fill in the gap.
Anyone want to write this?
There is a handy application called Pencil which could fit that need
http://www.evolus.vn/Pencil/
For some bizarre reason it is distributed as a Firefox extension normally, but it’s also available as a standalone application.
I’ve seen Pencil. It’s a nice mockup tool, but unless they’ve added to it since, it doesn’t let you create interactive mockups, just images?
Why couldn’t this be done in something like inkscape? Would need a widget library or something ontop of inkscape and maybe add some simple interactions to take them to different screens.
Playing with the prototype at the moment. The ribbon I don’t like (especially the scrolling one), but the little things, I do! For example, you no longer need to right-click in the slide panel to add a new slide, you just click a button on the last slide.
As Aq said, I’m impressed that they did this in the first place. The amount of features that the prototype actually has is impressive, and it really lets you see what they’re thinking about in a way that screenshots and screencasts never do. Studying HCI at university we were required to create UI mockups, and ended up with a load of dodgy HTML and AJAX which didn’t do a great job of doing what we intended. From this point of view I can certainly understand why more people aren’t doing this sort of thing – it’s hard!
OGG is not working
now fixed. thanks.
Cheers, pal!
Nice shot guys, I wasn’t aware of this effort. There was some mocking in the office but general consensus was that this can only be a “Good Thing”^TM
It’d be nice for we lazy buggers if you put relevant links in the summary, i.e. the Renaissance page? For other lazy buggers; have at this – http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Renaissance
What could be awesome for the shot page is to have a ‘User Contributed Links’ section where people can add links to interesting content to continue the discussion.
Anyone aware of a plugin for Wordpress that does this?
What some podcasts are doing these days is linking to a wiki for their “show notes” and then the community fills it out with relevant content. Might be worth considering that
You should check out the Stack Overflow podcast and see how they ask for help with their transcriptions (here’s an example of a wiki transcript for episode 75: https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W29099). At the bottom of each episode post, they link to each transcript (ala http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/11/podcast-75/) and at the end of each podcast they say something like:
“Spolsky: Cool, alright, that was an interesting conversation. Thanks Josh for the question. Josh, also while we also have you on the line, thanks for all the transcripts that you’ve done, and all the editing of transcripts on the wiki.
By the way, if this is your first time listening we do have a large team of volunteers around the world who are all contributing to the transcript website which you can get to at blog.stackoverflow.com and there are transcripts that are provided for the benefit of search engines like Google and also for the benefit of the hearing impaired who can’t listen to our podcast. So thank-you to all those volunteers who contribute those: thank-you very much.
If you have a question or something you want to debate or something interesting or something that’ll cause an argument between me and Jeff here, because we don’t argue enough. Please record it in the form of an MP3 or Ogg Vorbis and e-mail it to podcast@stackoverflow.com.”
It doesn’t always work. The earlier episodes have more detailed transcripts than the latest which mostly have “Edit Me” links. And some are hilarious commentary on the show itself.
But, it’s a start and could help with searching for content in previous podcasts.
It’d be even nicer if openoffice.org’s search engine gave you a link to it when you search for “renaissance” – I had to find a link in a forum post which was a search result!
)
I agree with Aq to say hats off for putting the effort in. As Tola says, Google Docs does almost enough for any casual office product user, so if OpenOffice wants to get real attention they need to make it different and coming up with really novel but usable UIs is one way to do that.
With regard to UI mockups, thanks for the Pencil link. I might look at it for work I’m doing right now, which I’ve been using (and struggling a little) OmniGraffle Pro for, which is pay-for, Mac only, and is a general if flexible drawing tool, not a UI design tool.
Certainly as far as I’ve seen if you want a UI mockup with any animation or functionality you have to code it. Something like Impress with scripting to modify components as part of a transition would be pretty cool (e.g. take text of this field, call it $username, then set this new label to the same text, say “Welcome ” + $username). Can you do that with Impress/other tools?
I gotta say, the functional prototype of Impress is really frickin’ cool, IMHO, and I do like the new widgets and ways of doing things (like the little x/+/2 bit and the toolbar tabs at the top where a lot of space is often wasted).
Excellent shot again, guys, and thanks but not thank for the heavy breathing Aq. ;o)
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Definitely agree that there are no good UI design tools out there. The best I’ve heard of is: Metisse. It looks horrendous as a widget library, but the concept of UI library that allows for movable, reconfigurable UI design is cool. Now if only someone could build such a configurable-at-runtime tool for Gtk or Qt with a palette of UI widgets let you hook up different widgets to different backend code; that would be really cool.
I wish the guys working on the OOo UI redesign good luck. But honestly, I think the KOffice devs are closer to building a nice office suite with a good UI, than the OpenOffice folks are to making OOo not look like a clone of Office 98. :S
In regard to the topic any improvement in the OOo UI must be a good thing, I’m attempting to get OOo adopted at work as part of our standard desktop install and a better looking UI would definitely not hurt. In regard to the new show it self, sheer unadultrated awesomeness, now just make it longer and add a pissed off bald sysadmin and a short dog loving marketing fanatic and it’ll be perfect. Seriously though great beyond words to hear some of the funniest, best thought out argueing ever to grace the tubes back out there again. Cheers.
I also did not know about this, and likewise am encouraged that someone is even working on it.
I think offices are one genre of software where the proprietary guys really have a better product, and we need to at least catch up, but hopefully surpass them.
I always like to point out that Lyx (or straight LaTeX, if you happen to be crazy), plus awesome tools like GNU Plot, is light years ahead of all of them.
It’s weird; all the good ones use Qt
(Except Gnumeric, I guess, which is also really darn good in my simplistic view).
Not for presentations
I quite like LyX myself for documents, I admit it.
Just caught up with all the episodes so far and enjoyed them a lot. Like the theme tune too. Keep up the good work gents.
I didn’t know about the OpenOffice.org UI redesign. I think it’s a positive idea and I hope they can succeed with it. OpenOffice.org is a key app in helping people with the transition to Open Source in the first instance, something I think we all want to encourage.
I like what they are doing. My problem with using OOo for anything complex was trying to figure out where the object I needed was. Any of the mock-ups would be better than the current UI.
good shot,
When MS Office 2007 came out, I hate the ribbon and UI like no man should be able to hate any non-animated object. Then I started learning it, by using it, and it started making sense, I got some of my work done quicker, faster and more professionally (I especially loved the “remove duplicates” button)
Now, its been 18months since I last used any Windows product for anything, but I still steer away from OO, it sucks! The UI feels like its stuck in win95 mode somewhere, the flow of buttons, menus feels like someone just said “righ, I see some space in this menu, lets stick it in there.”
So, I can’t just sit and complain about it, I need to join the testing/using of OO, get on the mailing lists, and DO something about it, this is the power of community, getting changes done without bombarding the developers with stupid “I hate this because…” messages, join up, get posting, talk to other members, and find suitable solutions.
hmm, rereading that, I sound like some kindd of moss-eating, gaaaad daaamn hippy!
On UI mock-upss and development, I’ve been trying to get something that works, I do a bit of developing for apps that people use at the office, andthat’s’s the biggest problemmock-up-up where I can go and say, do you like this, would you like this rather, I have this ideI’mI’m stuck now wheIe I make web-pagesages, and with php and javascripting show them idemock-upskups, but its not a great solution.
I’d also love to be able to mock-up lets say OO, post it somewhere, say, right this is my idea on how it should look, then other users can go in, through the web, and change my mockup, eg no this button should go there, or hey lets stick a huge logo of a chicken (’cause chickens are awesome) on the top right corner.
we are sharing ideas already, would love to be able to share UI ideas, on the go, maybe the new Big Brother Google could do something like this on Google Wave?
Anyhow, great shot, to OO dev guys maybe reading this, keep at it!
I hope they dont go with the ribbon, we got upgraded at work to the latest microsoft office and it pissed us all off beyond all understanding. After a week of everyone giving the IT guy shit about it he just installed Open-Office on all our computers and took a week off.
If Open office changes to the ribbon what im I going to use Kate?
I like OOo. I can find templates and examples on-line, do my work, and export to MS formats when needed, or PDF’s.
I recommend it to my students, who don’t always have cash (blowing all their money on Ramen Noodles again!) for the acedemic version of Microsoft or Corel Office.
Anyone using an office suite other than the above mentioned, or Koffice?
Open Office is not bad, I don’t use it frequently but when i need to use an office package I find it fills my needs adequately and is ‘good enough’.
The UI could be better though, but I hate the MS ribbon thing with a vengeance, its a complete pain in the [expletive removed] so id say a flat no to that one if it was introduced.
I seem to remember larry wanting to add the javafx stuff to it, but I think that is still not os software so believe it shouldn’t have any place in open office…i could be wrong about it not being os though…will actually go look now
I think the fact that they are willing to discuss and change the UI does show hope for the project…
This is a good point about raising JavaFX here, jtk. JavaFX would make it easier to do a lot of the new UI components that they’re obviously playing around and considering in Renaissance. It would certainly be easier than using straight Java. In fact it wouldn’t surprise me at all if that’s what they have used for the Impress demo, now that I look at it.
I think Larry’s comment about using JavaFX in OOo was meant to embiggen the profile of JavaFX and give it a really meaty application to give it kudos (which just sounds like PR spin), but I think if they’re going to completely redesign the UI and then use JavaFX for it, then it’s a great idea.
Oh, beware the Java3D view in the Impress demo – it comes up fine and looks spiffy (cf itunes album cover view for slides), but I can’t switch back to the non-3D views now.
I don’t know why Aq was so sure that this couldn’t be a reality by June 2010. If Ubuntu can release a whole distro in 6 months, why couldn’t a UI be revamped in the same time frame?
I’ve seen the speed at which the OpenOffice.org project moves; it is not all that fast. Redesigning and completely rebuilding the UI for OO.o Impress touches quite a lot of the codebase. I’d be happy to be proved wrong here, of course!
As you alluded in the shot (at least i think you alluded) the interesting thing is that it’s happening. I wonder if the plan is to rush out a slightly polished turd, in order to get momentum going? I also get the feeling that we’ll end up with a whizzy ui prototying tool and a sucky OOo interface that’s just differently sucky to vanilla OOo.
I hadn’t heard of this effort and I was impressed with the demo, though I suspect that your show’s audience strained the servers as it took almost an hour for it to launch on my desktop from the Java Webstart link.
I don’t know if I love the GUI. It will be interesting to see how they incorporate this in the final product. It’s interesting just to see something new (and in some ways innovative) in this product space. Some of the design elements, like switching between the master and design view were pretty nice.
However, I hope they focus on fixing the functionality of some of the internal tools as well. Please, PLEASE, do something about the chart tools!
After you use the wizard to create and initial chart in OOo, don’t expect to do too much with it. Changing layouts or playing with the visualization after that point is a real pain and very error prone. Still, I wish them luck.
Let’s hope it goes well.
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Functionality-wise I think that ooo is an incredibly impressive application. It lets me do pretty much everything that I have ever need an Office suite to do.
The exception to my usage is the database, I am still stuck using Access.
I work in a school, and have to support users using MS Office. While at first the Ribbon seemed completely alien to me, when used in Access recently it actually does make some sense (to me at least).
On my Desktop machine I use ooo, and really don’t have any problems with it. That doesn’t necessarily mean though that the GUI is perfect, and I agree that a redesign is a good thing.
It seems working from first principles has been really good. The opposite approach could’ve been tried, utilising what was there and just adding buttons, moving buttons etc.
The pressure on the school I work at to migrate to office 2007 was quite large. More and more students were getting new PC’s, and bringing files in for me to convert. Guess what I used to convert the files?
The above paragraph explains the background for this paragraph. The company used to supply a lot of schools in the UK with their school network, equipment and software have decided to install ooo on all the school computers (in Dudley, West Midlands) anyway.
I think this is a massive, and very important thing for this large company to install open source software on such a large amount of PCs.
The question is though, why did they do it? Was it the “familiarity” of GUI with the GUI of office 2003?
I’m not sure, but I am pleased with the result!
Really surprised you guys didn’t talk about Symphony.
If IBM had actually developed that stuff out in the open, the rationale for Renaissance would be severely curtailed: all the sharp edges seem to have been rounded off, the UI looks more modern and certainly a lot simpler.
OOo’s code base is indeed hard to hack on, and to divide up the developer community in the way IBM have is bizarre.
Yeah. I didn’t mention Symphony because, as far as I can tell, it’s had zero impact. Perhaps I’ve been looking in the wrong places; are there any examples of Symphony usage anywhere?
Oh, no, as far as I know it’s had zero impact, and I don’t even know if they’ve moved it off the old OOo 1.x base it used to be on.
But it does strike me that Renaissance isn’t a million miles away from it in many ways, and it proves that OOo doesn’t have to have a sucky UI.
Symphony’s not amazing, but it’s a lot better thought out.
Although there are obvious drawbacks to OOo, with regards it’s size (bloatedness), it has to be remembered that any full office suite is going to be large (I think this was pointed out in the Shot). The one feature that I’d keep over (almost) any other is the ability to save a document to .pdf format with a single click. I don’t know if other office suites have this facility, but for me it’s invaluable.
A little nota bene…
A hell of a lot of previously happy MS Office users hated the last version of Office. Mostly because although the previous UI was a bit clumsy, it had the benefit of being familiar. Because so much was radically changed, a lot of folk who could care less about UI ergonomics felt burdoned by having to relearn how to use the UI when they didn’t feel the old one was “broken”. The did relearn it eventually, but only because they had no choice in the matter. I hope we don’t go too far down that road.
However, OpenOffice’s UI is the thing most frequently complained about as to why people don’t like it. It is not possible to simultaneously handle “fix the UI” and “don’t change the UI”.
True. But the UI is not one amorphous lump, it’s a collection of elements. I’m arguing that there are a lot of elements that work and should be retained. I think it’s more important for OOo to consider this because they haven’t got vendor lock-in and thousands of numbskull it departments forcing people to relearn a radically altered UI. Because of this, I think the approach should not be chuck the whole UI out and start again. Wouldn’t it be better to begin by defining all the UI elements into say 3 categories, what is good and should be kept as is; what can be improved; what is bad and must be completely changed? I just think that way you have a better chance to strike a balance between familiarity and looks.
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I applaud the OpenOffice project. Having a full feathered cross platform open source office suite is a must. If it’s not your cup of tea just use something else: Abiword, koffice, vi
OpenOffice is one of the those apps (like Firefox) that non F/OSS try and like. Many school districts give it away to their students as a free alternative to MSOffice. Choice is good.
The fact that OpenOffice usability and styling is a topic for discussion just shows that we expect it to do the job. We just want it to do it in a nicer way.
I’m on OpenOffice 2.4 and it does what I need. I’m use to it and find it perfectly usable. If it is made easier and better then I’m all for that.
Maybe OpenOffice.org should try to separate the app into backend and frontend and things could become really interesting… An idea for OO.org 4.0 maybe?
My first post here linking in from FLOSS (drop more plugs mate) so I guess I will just dive in…. Right, so Im giving Sun some slack here. I don’t mind the UI so much at all, at worst it could use a refresher at best I find it works without a hiccup. Imagine Renaissance trying this with Adobe shite! (last years “Just wait for the update in a few weeks” line that there support were dishing out as a solution to the Acrobat issue) In todays fiscal climate, Open Office provides an alternative to smaller companies or blokes sporting “Hoover Flags”. The biggest difference I find is OO is a little sluggish to save…but no more so than Google docs … give them some time and lets see what happens. Thanks for the effort boys.
FF