Category: comp/tech

Another call for sanity has been issued by Jem Matzan of the Jem Report:

I’m getting desperate for a word processor made for writing — letters, articles, books, essays, and that sort of thing. I don’t want to design banners, fliers, brochures, or hand-outs. If I need to do those things, I’ll use a desktop publishing program like Scribus. I don’t need to draw in my document; I have The GIMP and Inkscape for drawing. Please, somebody do for OpenOffice.org what Firefox did for Mozilla, and cut down Writer into something that resembles its name. If people really need to do all of that extra stuff, maybe it should be in its own separate desktop publishing program instead of jammed into a word processor.

And another appreciated insight:

The uselessness of a meeting is directly proportional to the complexity of the PowerPoint presentation. If you want to quote me on that in the future, mark it down as Jem’s Law.

I don’t agree 100% with the ideas in this article, but thought it was interesting to see another recommendation to Firefox-ify OpenOffice.

There’s some more discussion over here and over here that resembles some of my thoughts on the development of the OpenOffice.org office suite (a replacement for Microsoft Office).
Once again, my take on it is that:

1. While each individual OO.o application should be pared down and allowed to have “extensions” like Firefox does, the applications should be kept together as a complete suite. Otherwise, individual applications could lose steam/critical mass;
2. OpenOffice should be ported to a standard toolkit such as GTK+ so it doesn’t look so ugly! That is to say, so that it has an interface that really blends with the rest of the desktop rather than using GUI hacks to almost blend in.

I’d also like to say that in general OpenOffice.org is a pretty lame piece of software. is rather good but has quite a number of areas for improvement (sorry about the previous negative attitude 😉

First off, does it even use a standard GUI toolkit? No. Why not? Because it’s legacy software: OO.o has a long history, dating back to its StarOffice days before coming under the auspices of Sun Microsystems. First order of business: move over to Qt or Gtk, both of which are ported onto every significant platform OO.o would want to be involved in.

Second: it’s huge and slow. The “Options” window is cluttered worse the the KDE Control Center (and that says quite a bit). Some of the components depend on Java. The “Draw” program can’t even import SVG files and never prints correctly. Because it doesn’t use a standard toolkit, it has issues with some Unicode characters, even when using a font that supports those characters. Usability and UI design also seem to be a low priority for the project (I know it’s not, but it appears so).

So what do I recommend? Since the likelihood of OpenOffice ever actually being ported to a standard GUI toolkit is essentially zero, I recommend that development effort be focused on bringing apps such as Gnumeric and Abiword up to speed with the featurefulness of OO.o.

My dream recommendation, given any amount of resources being made available, is that OO.o be ported to Gtk. Then, it would be restructured to be the Firefox of office software – a lean core functionality and a flexible “Extensions” mechanism. This would hopefully lower the barrier-to-entry for programmers sufficiently as to encourage wide participation by people interested in improving the office suite. The lean core could then be focused on and maintained more effectively than the massive bulk of the do-it-all office program.