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K-9
The Merovingian
Joined: Mar 15, 2006
Posts: 571
Location: U.S.
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yoxi
Cipher
Joined: Sep 07, 2004
Posts: 1799
Location: Dawlish, Devon
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 Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 8:10 am Post subject: |
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Fantastic gobbledegook sentence on the OOo Renaissance website:
"Since recently, office productivity vendors started to seek for experience-based differentiation by focusing on usage efficiency and a visually appealing interface."
I want people who write like that involved in improving the ease-of-use of OpenOffice  |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 8:56 am Post subject: |
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Not trying to be negative, but I seriously doubt that this will ever happen. Why? Because VCL was written by a small group of engineers at Star Division (the company that Sun bought) and most of those engineers no longer work for Sun. Nevertheless, the remaining engineers have been using VCL with very little modification for at least the last 8 years (the VCL code is not substantially different from what was there back in 2000 when I worked at Sun).
The other factor that will probably keep this project perpetually in the design phase is budget. IMHO, OpenOffice.org has appeared to be barely able to support the code that they already have and any new features seem to fall far short of what was originally promised. This says that their hands are already full. Add in the likely shrinkage in Sun's workforce due to their declining hardware sales, I find it hard to believe that the existing (or smaller) OpenOffice.org engineering workforce is going to be able to implement a top-to-bottom redesign of OpenOffice.org.
Patrick |
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K-9
The Merovingian
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| Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 9:04 am Post subject: |
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That is cool. I understand. I just thought you might want to see it.
edit: if they ever did do it - I wold assume that that would mean a lot more work for you...maybe not... |
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pluby
The Architect
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| Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 9:14 am Post subject: |
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| K-9 wrote: | | edit: if they ever did do it - I wold assume that that would mean a lot more work for you...maybe not... |
Yes, it would definitely be a huge amount of work. This is my pet peeve about software engineering: there is desire to constant redesign instead of incrementally enhancing what already is available and working. I understand why this desire is there as I have felt it every so often over the course of my career. But, in the end, the old accountant in me (I was an accountant for several years before I learned how to code) wins out and I realize that a redesign is far costlier in time and money than working with what I already have.
Patrick |
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K-9
The Merovingian
Joined: Mar 15, 2006
Posts: 571
Location: U.S.
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| Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 9:29 am Post subject: |
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| I agree! |
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ovvldc
Captain Naiobi
Joined: Sep 13, 2004
Posts: 2352
Location: Zürich, CH
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| Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 9:47 am Post subject: |
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On the other hand, I recall the number of times Patrick and Ed have complained about the mess that is VCL and how that code not implemented in a practical, modular and centralised way.
While I would agree that changing VCL would give a serious burden to everyone involved with OpenOffice and NeoOffice, it might make the thing less of a pain in the posterior.
Also, I would expect that some of the UI redesign would be front-end stuff without severe changes in the back-end..
Best wishes,
Oscar
_________________
"What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 11:40 am Post subject: |
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| ovvldc wrote: | On the other hand, I recall the number of times Patrick and Ed have complained about the mess that is VCL and how that code not implemented in a practical, modular and centralised way.
While I would agree that changing VCL would give a serious burden to everyone involved with OpenOffice and NeoOffice, it might make the thing less of a pain in the posterior. |
While that is true, the key thing is that we have already worked around those issues and gone through the painful testing and bug fixing process. Changing VCL would likely mean doing that process all over again.
In most of the big code redesign proposals that I have had experience with, the promise of "it will be much easier to maintain after we are done" is rarely as big a benefit as expected. After all, a lot of the tangled, difficult to understand code that is yanked out was there to fix rare but significant bugs.
Closer to our current work, we are already seeing the effects of small VCL changes in our NeoOffice 3.0 Early Access development. The OpenOffice.org engineers changed the native widget framework code in several places. While that may make their code easier to maintain, they not only broke much of our code but their new code suffers from what Ed has dubbed the "cheap whore" effect in OpenOffice.org Aqua.
In other words, while code changes may seem to make things simpler, many times they merely shift the complexity elsewhere or cause a bunch of new bugs.
All I am saying is that given the past history of dealing with OOo changes, we should move very cautiously when incorporating any radical changes to OOo.
Patrick |
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vida18
Agent
Joined: Sep 13, 2008
Posts: 10
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aussie149
The Merovingian
Joined: Feb 12, 2005
Posts: 607
Location: Australia
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| Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2008 7:40 pm Post subject: Stirring the pot |
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Thanks vida18. Just as an aside, I note that in the slides in that odp presentation, they have used screenshots with the Tango iconset, rather than the default [Galaxy] iconset. My point is that the User Experience team prefers not to use the default iconset. Could that perhaps lead to a change in the "default" OOo iconset 
Peter |
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