Joined: Jun 20, 2006 Posts: 2051 Location: Midwest, USA
Posted: Mon Sep 24, 2007 7:56 am Post subject:
Kookie,
While I appreciate your constructive criticism, I doubt the changes you have requested will be made. To undergo a revision of the website is a major investment of time, and would pull precious developer time away from fixing bugs and preparing new releases.
If we had unlimited resources, I would agree with you. But given the funding and time restrictions inherent to the NeoOffice project, there are, in my opinion, higher priorites.
In terms of learning about the latest patch, though, there is an e-mail list that announces patches and new versions. Instructions for signing up are at the bottom of this page.
It is a very low-traffic e-mail list, only used to notify folks of patches and new versions.
i should have explained the RSS issue in more detail.
i myself am a subscriber to the news-feed for a couple of months already.
my points are:
#1
the link to the RSS news-feed should be on the homepage - not in the depths of some trinity whatever.
i myself went the extra miles to finally find the forum and all information that i needed.
but when i recommend NeoOffice to friends who are not computer experts - probably even new to the Mac this is what happens:
they come back to me saying that they installed a copy of Microsoft Office illegally instead of fighting their way through a NeoOffice installation - which starts at neooffice.org. This first step already turns out to be annoying at first and also at second glance.
i agree with them.
but i like NeoOffice a lot and appreciate the work of everybody involved in the project. THANKS A LOT!
but it is a fact that you guys sometimes fail to look at your baby from a user's point of view - especially when the user is a newbie.
this is what i wanted to remind you of.
i mentioned the Mac experience. in the case of the RSS feed that means that the RSS icon should display in Safari's* location bar.
ease of use!
* i mentioned Safari since it is Mac OS X's default browser.
#2
the news-feed i subscribed to
(http://trinity.neooffice.org/backend.php - Vienna as my newsreader)
does not provide me with information on patches. annoying!
do i expect too much asking for info on the release of patches in the feed? should not be a big issue i thought
While I appreciate your constructive criticism, I doubt the changes you have requested will be made. To undergo a revision of the website is a major investment of time, and would pull precious developer time away from fixing bugs and preparing new releases.
If we had unlimited resources, I would agree with you. But given the funding and time restrictions inherent to the NeoOffice project, there are, in my opinion, higher priorites.
Lorinda is correct: this is not a trivial exercise and given that we have only me and Ed to do all of the engineering of both NeoOffice and the website, this is not going to happen.
While I understand that you wished NeoOffice could be as simple to download as Firefox, there are some very significant differences between the Firefox project and the NeoOffice project that prevent us from mimicking Firefox. The biggest differences are:
1. Staffing - Firefox has a multi-million dollar annual budget that is funded by large companies like Google, Sun, HP, and IBM. In contrast, corporate backers have no interest in funding NeoOffice which means all of our funding must come from the small donations that less than 2% of our users give us when they download. This difference in funding translates into Firefox having 1 to 2 orders of magnitude more staff than we can even dream of having.
2. Size of the application - Firefox is just not a very big application. Their universal download only 5% of the size of what a universal download would be for NeoOffice. Since Firefox's download is only 16 MB, it is easy to make download a simple, one-click process. In contrast, a universal NeoOffice download would be about 325 MB. Given that serving 250,000+ download of that size of binary can seriously overwhelm many of our volunteer mirrors, we must break our binary into smaller chunks and do patching to minimize the load.
If you have suggested wording changes for specific paragraphs and links, that kind of change is doable and feel free to post your suggested changes. However, the donation buttons and the separate installer and patch downloads will still need to be supported for the foreseeable future.
Joined: Apr 25, 2006 Posts: 2315 Location: Montpellier, France
Posted: Mon Sep 24, 2007 9:00 am Post subject:
Kookie wrote:
the link to the RSS news-feed should be on the homepage - not in the depths of some trinity whatever.
The neooffice.org website has no RSS feed. Only Trinity has one - it's only natural that this feed is found on Trinity and not neooffice.org. Trinity is where all the activity is.
Kookie wrote:
i mentioned the Mac experience. in the case of the RSS feed that means that the RSS icon should display in Safari's* location bar.
It does for me (on Trinity).
Kookie wrote:
does not provide me with information on patches. annoying!
do i expect too much asking for info on the release of patches in the feed? should not be a big issue i thought
We do not provide info on patches through Trinity, so it won't be in the RSS feed. You can get info on patches through the mailing list or or the NeoWiki.
Kookie wrote:
but it is a fact that you guys sometimes fail to look at your baby from a user's point of view - especially when the user is a newbie.
this is what i wanted to remind you of.
Many people think they need to remind us of many things. Sure, the website would benefit from a redesign, and we get lots of good suggestions, but who will do it? Those who have the skills to do so are busy fixign bugs and implementing new features (which are at least as requested as a website redesign), and those who may have the time to do it don't know how to maintain or redesign a website.
Kookie wrote:
but when i recommend NeoOffice to friends who are not computer experts - probably even new to the Mac this is what happens:
they come back to me saying that they installed a copy of Microsoft Office illegally instead of fighting their way through a NeoOffice installation - which starts at neooffice.org. This first step already turns out to be annoying at first and also at second glance.
i agree with them.
It certainly isn't perfect - but still, about 250'000 people manage to find their way through the website each month…
this is article is very interesting. would love you to read it.
i intend to post a few thoughts related to NeoOffice later this week.
kissy from *kookie
While this is a very interesting article to read, I think I know where this is going and, to be frank, I get a sense that you really don't understand our purpose and goals.
Most of the points in this article really flow from "Secret 5: You can't please everyone, so please people with good taste". Given that Apple's products are geared to the high end customer, it is no surprise that for Apple, cool design and cutting-edge technology are what distinguishes itself. To sell to the high end customers, you have to have something to justify the premium associated with your high margin products.
The organization and product features of the NeoOffice project, in constrast, flow from a different "secret": You can't please everyone, so help provide some alternative for those that Microsoft and Apple aren't interested in pleasing. Not surprisingly, this "niche" that NeoOffice serves contains a large number of people and organizations that have limited funds and, as a result, consider price more important than superior design.
The niche we serve is largely ignored by large corporations because they see no profit. We knew this when we started the project and this still holds true today. This is why we run the NeoOffice project like a non-profit organization. As I've said many times before over the last 5 years in these forums, the high end Mac customers are already served by Microsoft Office and iWork; we merely provide an alternative for the users who are left behind by this.
While the "Apple way" is a very valid business model, it is also a capital intensive one. We don't have the $10 million+ in capital to try and mimic Apple's approach and no venture capitalists are interested in funding this approach for one simple reason: there is no significant profit to be gained. The fact that Ed and I had to fund this out of our own pocket for the first three years only confirmed this.
Not everyone agrees with the purpose and goals that Ed and I have set for the project. Some want us to be a "fully HIG compliant app" and others want us to be "a Microsoft Office killer". That is not our scope. Our scope is simple: to provide users that need it with a free alternative to Microsoft Office on their Macs without going broke ourselves. If you seriously need the power of Microsoft Office or find value in the superior design of Apple's iWork, we feel that you should buy those products.
If you think we are running the project wrong (and your comments so far have hinted at that), repeatedly telling us that you think we are doing it wrong is likely to get a deaf ear. Why? Because we aren't holding your vision back; you can pursue your vision with our code with your own labor and capital. Our code is freely available under the GPL so that you can take our code and whatever capital you raise and implement your own product that represents your vision.
Sound like a lot of work? You bet. And a lot of risk. That's why we don't have limited our scope to a certain small niche of Mac users and we aren't interested in leveraging ourselves in a chase after Apple's products. Our product maybe imperfect and ugly in places, but it fills a need and we are happy with that.
NeoOffice actually has quite a few features that MS Office does not have (more languages and scripts to name a big one, a stable style system to name a personal favourite).
best wishes,
Oscar _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Joined: Jun 20, 2006 Posts: 2051 Location: Midwest, USA
Posted: Tue Sep 25, 2007 5:35 am Post subject: Re: food for thoughts
pluby wrote:
The organization and product features of the NeoOffice project, in constrast, flow from a different "secret": You can't please everyone, so help provide some alternative for those that Microsoft and Apple aren't interested in pleasing. Not surprisingly, this "niche" that NeoOffice serves contains a large number of people and organizations that have limited funds and, as a result, consider price more important than superior design.
Patrick
And this, in fact, is precisely why I'm a NeoOffice user. While our household qualifies for the Student/Teacher price for MS Word, I was unwilling to shell out even that amount of money to Ms when an alternative existed.
I looked at iWork, but it didn't provide the features I needed.
I started with Neo 1.2, if memory serves, and I was willing to live with a very non-Apple like feel and the few weaknesses of NeoOffice (particularly slow loading, etc.) precisely because of the cost differential. Now, of course, Neo has a much greater "native Apple feel," for which I am deeply appreciative. Those improvements would not have happened, or would have happened much more slowly, had Ed and Patrick been spending a lot of time on website design.
patrick i know that there have been several offers to help with the website. i myself have offered many times. in fact, i started the wiki as a result of one of those conversations with you.
help with the website is something that can come easily from the community. a test site that is worked on and then approved by yourself and ed would, IMHO, work quite well.
if you wish to retain control as you have, obviously we can't change that. but the option for help has been here for quite some time.
personally, i'd rather have you coding neo than html.
patrick i know that there have been several offers to help with the website. i myself have offered many times. in fact, i started the wiki as a result of one of those conversations with you.
Really? Where? We have people translating and I post those as fast as possible. But no one has stepped forward to rewrite the significant amount of business logic in the website. Making mockups is fine, but implementing those into our existing business logic within the website and then retranslating them all is not trivial amount of work.
Our pages are not static pages. They require constant update and maintenance and even bug fixing. Ed and I have invested a lot of engineering to make our high volume website work smoothly so yes I reluctant to throw everything out and start all over since there are no developers other than Ed or I to reimplement, test, and fix what breaks.
As I said earlier in this thread, I have no problem with people proposing specific, incremental changes. Why only the incremental approach? Because then Ed and I can identify any business logic impacts quickly and modify them with minimal risk to the website.
As I said earlier in this thread, I have no problem with people proposing specific, incremental changes. Why only the incremental approach? Because then Ed and I can identify any business logic impacts quickly and modify them with minimal risk to the website.
Just to expand on this a little, when I say "incremental" I mean reworking a single section or page. From what I can see, the NeoWiki writers tend to use this approach and take a single page and attempt to reorganize it without losing any of the existing content.
This type of process is doable for the website. The key is to proceed with changes in small sequential chunks. That way, we can implement it, test it, and put the changes in production fairly quickly and, most importantly, quickly handle any breakages that may be found in production.
And we've done this in the past, like when we re-organized the "Header Table" to include the NeoWiki....
I haven't seen any concrete proposals to improve the website in quite some time--well, reasonable ones, since "get rid of the donations button" and "provide a single download link" aren't feasible fiscally or architecturally.
It would be nice if we could be like other Mac apps and provide a single Universal download with all supported languages, but Patrick's addressed this in this thread already (and, frankly, it's been beaten to death in the past two years in hundreds of other threads here).
It would be nice if we could have a simple, spartan web page like Firefox, but NeoOffice is a significantly more complex application than Firefox, built on a much more cumbersome architecture than Firefox, and requires more proactive pushing of information to potential users.
If the problem is that too few people ever visit trinity to see the Headlines feed here, it should be relatively trivial to add the feed url to the <head> of all the neooffice.org pages.... I don't really see people downloading and never visiting trinity, but....
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
While I agree with the incremental bit, the website seems to have a few redundancies which could do with stripping out. The Trinity news page seems like it would do better on the main NeoOffice site.
I also wonder if it is possible to automatically send the NeoOffice updates list mails into the RSS feed as well. Just so that people can stick to one level of info:
* updates (by mailing list)
* updates + headlines
* forum (I presume this includes any headlines, and there is almost always an FYI message about a new patch there)
Anyway, someone with more time, energy and web experience might be able to suggest some evolutionary but significant improvements
Best wishes,
Oscar _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You cannot download files in this forum
