Looking Good, or putting together a distributable clipart pk

[aussie149]

Call me shallow; maybe I like bling. I never could understand why people chose to watch black and white movies when colour was available. I like an attractive thing to look at, especially if I am looking at it for severaal hours in a day.

Now, I know this sort of approach distracts from the main game of development of the most functional comprehensive feature-rich suite of programs that NeoOffice can be. But I believe that more people will actually use NeoOffice, if it is not only a functional comprehensive feature-rich suite of programs, but an attractive and modern-looking functional comprehensive feature rich ....after all, a functional comprehensive feature-rich suite of programs that doesn't look up-to-date will not win users over from the programs they are used to.

All of this leads me to what you see when you have “Gallery” on. Click on that little button for “gallery”, and a section pops down with a selection of pictures on it. Maybe you always have it on. If you've done nothing much to your pictures, this is what it will look like. This is what mine looks like. Notice the difference. The standard opening graphics in the Gallery are these bit-mapped “3D” rubber tyres or donuts [called toroids , AFAICR]. Not very exciting, nor very state-of-the art. They look like Windows 3.11, because they lack any smoothing that we are used to.

Why do they appear when we open the gallery? Because they are in a Theme named “3D Effects”, which comes before all the others, since it starts with a number. You can ensure that a different set of pics comes up when Gallery is opened, by giving it a number before three. I have numbered my theme 01_Famous_artworks_thinkall (it came in a sampler gallery I bought from thinkall.com). That forces it to the top of the theme list.

Whatever pics are first in the folder then will come up first. You can manufacture whatever you want in this way. I collect some Hubble pics, number them in the order I want, and install them as a theme 00_Hubble_pics. Bingo, it appears at the top of the list, and my screen looks like this .

Or by simpling renaming themes (highlight the theme, control-click and select “Rename”on the context menu that pops up) you could have this or this as your default opening screen whenever Gallery is open. It will have minimal impact on your usage of the program, but it will present a much nicer face to you and anyone else looking at your screen.

You might want to try this: go to this site . Click on NeoScreen Preview and download the zip file. Unzip it. Open the folder called NeoPics Copy with Preview, so that there are thumbnails down the side. Then go to View: select Slideshow and watch the bar change. Having watched that, tell me that you are really very happy with the toroid [rubber tyres] and see no need to change. If so, I have a nice Commodore 128 somewhere that should be worth money to you: I'd love to sell it to you. And there's a Stylewriter here somewhere...



P

[Orgleser]

Peter, I love what I ve seen. Convinces me again our job done with the clipart thing was a good one ... and: Clipart useage can still be improved. What would be the next step? Improving the wiki further and further? But perhaps it is as with the template story: Ed suggested somewhere, we could provide an additional installer or thelike, that gives a few choosen templates (the probably most needed for average use) to people together with Neo to give them a feeling of what they could have.
Is it the same with clipart? Should we provide a small collection of free, state-of-the-art clipart? Could this be done without too much work for any of us?
Could we aim providing 2.x with an additional templates and clipart installer?
Or, is all of this thought too much? (Well you show us the possibilities of making Neo more attractive ... do we have time, space, people enough to provide a bit of them as a kind of "neo default"?)

[aussie149]

Hi Thomas [the shepherd: I like that, a nice nickname ]

Thanks for your response and encouraging words. I've been thinking about this. Some [random] thoughts:

1. We now have links to 100,000s of images on the NeoWiki [ eg at Sources - I kept adding to it eg wpclipart.com and Wikipedia PD links]. There's also PDfoto.com, which I haven't put up there. The count must be approaching 1 million. It's anybody's guess as to how many GB's that adds up to!!
2. So, there's no way we can package anything but a fraction of what's up there.
3. We need to credit the sources.
4. We need to ensure we don't take away from anybody's income eg the maintainer of wpclipart.com [can't find his name, psherma?] makes it clear he gets income from advertising on his site, which could be lost if someone put his collection up somewhere else. It would be good if we could increase the hits on their sites by what we do!
5. We can certainly boost the collection that comes with OpenOffice.org/ NeoOffice, and add some interesting and useful PD images that won't get us into copyright probs.

Maybe what we might consider is a package of about 150MB-200MB [ie no bigger than NeoOffice itself ] of themed images from a variety of sources, that we would consider as

1. likely to be useful
2. not likely to look out-of-date within a year or two
3. attractive
4. representative of what's available from these PD sources

I'd like to hear your and other's views on what they would like before we go too far with this, because it will be lots of work for us.

I am aware that this thread hasn't had too many views so far. Maybe it needs a new title eg New Clipart package for NeoOffice? Or maybe it needs to be "bumped" to NeoOffice Devt. or NeoOffice Support?

Regards
Peter

[Orgleser]

... still thinking with you.
As for title of the thread how would "adding clipart installation?" be? In my opinion Development would be a good place for this.
But doing this thing IS a question of time and space (as is the GUI ting or the template thing) ...

[aussie149]

[sardisson]

[aussie149]

[aussie149]

Thomas et al

I see the number of viewers more than doubled overnight - Thanks Smokey!

I have been thinking about ways to make it easy for a user to install a new collection. Because NeoOffice makes a link to each image as it sets up a theme, would it be useful to create a package where the links were the same from your computer to mine to his to hers etc.? Eg you might have an installer create a folder called Library/Application Support/Neo_image, and install all the collection's themes into that [I think someone suggested this earlier]. Alternatively, users could just follow instructions to do the same thing.

You end up with the theme folders inside Library/Application Support/Neo_image. The advantage of this is that it's the same path on everybody's computer. Many of my collections currently are in different spots inside NeoOffice.app, which is hard for the average user to duplicate or get to. This setting up in Library/Application Support is not hard, nor is the setting up of the collection [it takes volunteers time, but once it's done, everybody benefits].

Now, the tricky bit: where does NeoOffice store the pathways to each image, and can we save and install that information on a new compouter easily? Or does each new user have to set up each theme himself/herself? If we could minimise this step, and have an installer place the links in each person's NeoOffice or preferences, we'd have a winner!

Peter

[aussie149]

I have put up on this site some examples for consideration. First of all, there's a catalogue of what's in the openclipart.org package. Then, as an example of the next step, I have a catalogue of what's in the wpclipart package. Thirdly, I have a catalogue of some free photographs from a collection by an outstanding Hong Kong photographer at morguefile.com These are just examples to show what can be done. Use these sources appropriately. Please visit these sites and have a look. They are all doing outstanding work. I think they demonstrate that we could put together a very fine package of freely available art and photography, with permissions of course. With a friendly appraoch, that part should be quite achievable.

It would be great to get some feedback here Are we on the right track with this?

Peter

[Orgleser]

Peter I am going to view myself through the pics the next days as far as time allows and give a comment later.
Thanks for the job!
T.

[LemonAid]

[Orgleser]

I agree with Philip on 2. Ease of use is what users need most. But putting in a whole gallery like openclipart could be too much. Instead we should in my opinion give a small selection: Some .pngs for business office, some for private correspondence, some for e.g. childs birthday invitations, and, why not some for nature folks and some for space folks. AND then show users an EASY way to get more.
Now two questions:
First: can we consent on this way of doing it? As far as I understand Peters first posts here, we do. Other opinions?
Second: how many .pngs are in a "small" collection? 100? 20 per user interest?

A third question, Peter has already posted has slipped through the audiences eyes without finding an answer yet: Peter (aussi149) asked earlier: Are we re-inventing the wheel? This question has two aspects firstt: Could somebody search www.openoffice.org for gallery projects? Second: even if there already is something useable, how do we/can we integrate this to Neo?

[sardisson]

Two quick points:

A +1 for the stuff Thomas and Philip have said about the contents of the collection, and

A sad FYI that currently (i.e., as of 10.3, which you'll want to support) Installer.app does not allow for you to place files inside the user's directory anywhere using its own functionality. It's a real shame

You can work around this by having Installer.app "install" a zip/tar archive in a temp folder and then run a shell script to actually install the files in ~/Library/App Sup/foo or ~/Documents or whatever, or use an entirely different method of installation (AppleScript, or manual decompress+manual move-the-folders), but not nearly as easy* as generating a normal .pkg, or as elegant. FWIW.

* not that generating a normal .pkg is that easy, at least if you want to do it correctly and not fubar permissions on everyone's Macs, etc.

Smokey

[aussie149]

I take these points. Thanks for the feedback: from the usual suspects, I note I'd add that many people need images not just for Writer documents, but also for presentations etc. It's hard to predict every usage. In fact, often people decide to do something because they can ie because such-and-such an image is there.

Having said that, I've gone savagely through the openclipart collection and cut large chunks out. It's currently down to about 1600 images from I think about 8000. I will add in a few things eg a few old masters and a few photographs -eg space-flight ones. The overall size could pan out at around 30MB, which is less than a third of the openclipart download I think. I'll work on this over the next couple of days, Thomas et al, then share that around and we can work out where we go from there, which bits of this might suit etc, what we might need further, what more we can chop out etc.

It looks like I was right: this part will be the easy part. We can probably do this in a week or two, then spend time refining what's in the package, and how it's organised. The hard part will be trying to put it into an installation package that the average user can install. Smokey's injected a dose of cold reality into the issue with his technical understanding. This is the stuff some of us are hopeless with. I'm off to bed now.

Peter

[aussie149]