Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 12:23 am Post subject: My mom likes NeoOffice/J
HI all, just thought I would let you know that recently as a small personal experiment, I decided to put NeoOffice/J on my Mother and Father's computer and have them give it a whirl and see how they (more specifically mom) like it as compared to MS Office for MacOS X.
The reason behind this is that I was unable to find their MS Office CD after we did a HD upgrade and installed a newer version of MacOS X from scratch instead of doing an upgrade.
So far the results have been good. Mom says that she "likes it" and that it is pretty much as easy to use as MS Office for her. I asked her what was different and she told me that some things are in different places than what she is used to in MS Office, but other than that it is fantastic.
Now, I should tell you that mom turned 63 this year and is by no means "good" at using her Mac. Mom is a very typical older user. She just wants to get whatever it is that she is doing done. She can barely figure out how to add and remove items from the dock..ok that is a tad bit of an exaggeration, but she is at best a neophyte when it comes to computer knowlege.
Because of this, I have to say Thanks to the developers of NeoOffice/J. You obviously are committed to providing a quality Mac-like experience, and I applaud you for that.
Some things that I have noticed are that NeoOffice/J is not totally consistant with the Mac Interface. I believe (going from memory here in my short time watching my mother use NeoOffice/J) that the Open and Save dialogs were non-standard, and looked much like they do on a standard Linux/BSD installation running X and some Window manager of choice. Is this something that you guys are working on changing so that it is even more mac-like?
Anyway, thanks again to all the devs/beta testers, etc. for making this project so good that even a 63 year old novice computer user can use it effectively and be so happy doing it.
Welcome! We're glad to hear that your experiment has been successful so far. Would you mind if we added your post, or part thereof, to our Press Kit the next time we update it?
As for the non-standard bits of UI, our developers (and user community) are working on them, though at the moment the first priority is a number of steps that have to be taken to keep NeoOffice/J running on next year's Intel Macs (see this thread for more details). That said, once those tasks are done, we hope to get Ed back on "blue button" Aqua widget work, James Mckenzie working on converting the open/save dialogues to Mac OS X ones (we got James to start building Neo/J specifically for that purpose) and get our community-driven toolbar icon Aquafication back on track. It won't happen overnight, but these tasks are planned.
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
As for the non-standard bits of UI, our developers (and user community) are working on them, though at the moment the first priority is a number of steps that have to be taken to keep NeoOffice/J running on next year's Intel Macs (see this thread for more details). That said, once those tasks are done, we hope to get Ed back on "blue button" Aqua widget work, James Mckenzie working on converting the open/save dialogues to Mac OS X ones (we got James to start building Neo/J specifically for that purpose) and get our community-driven toolbar icon Aquafication back on track. It won't happen overnight, but these tasks are planned.
Dear Smokey, you sound like a pretty good general .
Seriously, I have a somewhat double edged announcement in about that last bit. I know I was trying to pull a toolbar development. Now recently, I acquired the interest of one female of our species and she is proving to be quite a handful (both good and bad - don't ask).
As a result I have little time to dedicate to toolbarring. Now, everything I have made so far can be found at my geocities website and I strongly encourage anyone who wishes to take them and edit as much as they care.
I don't think the whole set is ready for inclusion. OTOH, there's a good number of the icons that are better than the default and we might wish to include these in any case.
Right now I am not sure what must be done to enter these in CWS. There's a list that includes some sort of coordinates which tell OOo where to use them so I trust this will lead to the right place in CWS.
My apologies, but I'm pretty much out of time and I need to offload something to preserve the rest. I will still be around reading here, but I have trouble making enough time to dig into what must still be done (even if it is only about a day's worth of work on the design side).
Best wishes,
Oscar
P.S. Still looking forward to the post-Java, post-Intel prettyfication . _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Dear Smokey, you sound like a pretty good general .
I wasn't trying to We hope Ed, James, et al. will do those things, but we certainly can't command them to do them
ovvldc wrote:
Seriously, I have a somewhat double edged announcement in about that last bit. I know I was trying to pull a toolbar development. Now recently, I acquired the interest of one female of our species and she is proving to be quite a handful (both good and bad - don't ask).
One step at a time, right?
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2005 1:12 pm Post subject: Re: use in press kit
sardisson wrote:
Welcome! We're glad to hear that your experiment has been successful so far. Would you mind if we added your post, or part thereof, to our Press Kit the next time we update it?
Smokey
Smokey,
Feel free to use it, that would be wonderful indeed Additionally, if you would like to contact me directly, you are welcome to at greg.djrais@gmail.com I can put you in touch with "the mom" to talk to her directly or answer any questions you might have...
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