Posted: Sat Jun 04, 2005 6:02 pm Post subject: First things first: Introducing myself
My name is Tim Murray. I've been teaching MS Office products on a small scale (meaning lots of one-on-one sessions and a few small classes of perhaps four people) for nearly 20 years. I have a boatload of usability experience, and I know what frustrates users from the user interface point of view. I'm considered a Word expert (FrameMaker, too), and I can fly through a document so fast that people who watch me say, "slow down, you did that so fast I didn't see it."
I completely applaud the efforts of the team, coming up with a product such as the OpenOffice effort. I absolutely want it to succeed.
And that is exactly why I wrote this. I didn't want to come off as a big blowhard, yet I wanted to communicate my experience and knowledge so that . . . well, let's cut to the chase . . . so that I hoped my suggestions would have some weight and merit.
Which of the forums is the best one for general suggestions?
Welcome, Tim.
Depends on the suggestion Most of the time the answer is either Bugzilla or "not here"
It's important to recognize/remember the scope of the NeoOffice/J project (and even the Mac porting project within OpenOffice.org itself) is quite limited.
OpenOffice.org is developed by a large team of Sun engineers for Solaris, Windows, and Linux. They design the UI and program functions to be reasonably platform-compliant and cross-platform within those three OSes. Everything else is done by a very small number of volunteers.
While there's obviously room for platform-compliance and platform-specific feature work (voilà NeoOffice/J), that space is quite limited by the massive size of the codebase, its ever-changing nature, the lack of a complete GUI abstraction (certain parts of the UI, like the "save" progress bar IIRC, are still defined outside of the VCL module), Sun's three-platform strategy, and available manpower for doing such work.... (And platform-specific changes for non-core platforms can't break, or in 99.9% of the time even cause non-breaking changes--see the fight over getting the N*F frameworks adopted, and Ed's bitrotting meta accelerator patch--anything on the core platforms....)
So, to answer your question: things that involve fixing things that work correctly in the X11 version of OpenOffice.org, or for certain (and you won't know until you've been told afterwards) Mac-compliance issues, Bugzilla is your best bet. For core features (or associated bugs) that are clearly cross-platform, the OpenOffice.org IssueZilla is the place. For certain Mac-compliance/Aquafication tasks, NeoOffice/J Development (see the GUI icon thread). For everything else, usually Random Whatnot
I don't want to be negative, just realistic. Lots of time new folks show up on the forums expecting to change the world, or for Aquafication/AHIG-compliance to be a breeze ("these devs just don't know about these rules, that's why they haven't implemented x yet"). The reality is much more sobering and the issues much more complex. OTOH, we have the longest-serving and most-experienced Mac OOo folks here, Patrick from the beginning (the aborted Sun port of StarOffice to Mac OS X which formed the basis for Mac OOo) and Ed since then, shepherding every final Mac OOo build to release....
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Which of the forums is the best one for general suggestions?
Depends on the suggestion :wink: Most of the time the answer is either Bugzilla or "not here" :-)
...
So, to answer your question: things that involve fixing things that work correctly in the X11 version of OpenOffice.org, or for certain (and you won't know until you've been told afterwards) Mac-compliance issues, Bugzilla is your best bet. For core features (or associated bugs) that are clearly cross-platform, the OpenOffice.org IssueZilla is the place. For certain Mac-compliance/Aquafication tasks, NeoOffice/J Development (see the GUI icon thread). For everything else, usually Random Whatnot :-)
Smokey
Thanks for that excellent reply.
I have a suggestion that would be an added core feature that's cross-platform, so I figure OpenOffice.org IssueZilla is the place. Within that system, you are asked to select the version it's based on.
Thanks for that excellent reply.
I have a suggestion that would be an added core feature that's cross-platform, so I figure OpenOffice.org IssueZilla is the place. Within that system, you are asked to select the version it's based on.
Would it be "OOo 2 beta"? Something else?
Neo/J 1.1 Release Candidate is equal to OOo 1.1.4, the latest stable version.
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
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