User Experience

[rerhart]

Hello,

I do not know how far you can go in changing NeoOffice, since you rely on code from Openoffice.org. So I hope you will not feel offended if I suggest that you dramatically enhance=reduce the UI, by…

…scrapping at least half of the settings (those not absolutely necessary)
…simplifying the menu structure
…reducing the number of toolbars and buttons (but making them shinier)
…simplifying dialog boxes by making options accessible through buttons
…removing dotted borders for highlighted elements
…generally using more visual guides and increasing spacing within and between elements (toolbar buttons, dialog box elements, control buttons)

Not only will this increase performance, but also leave new users, especially those switching from the "big player" apps, less confused.

Kind regards

Raffael Erhart
rerhart@me.com[/list]

[pluby]

Unfortunately, this is not feasible for us to implement as what you are requesting is pretty much a complete rewrite of NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code.

Our very limited donation revenues support one half-time engineer (me) to do all development and support. These very tight financial and time constraints have limited our scope to upgrading the NeoOffice code to the latest OpenOffice.org version about once a year. This leaves enough funding to investigate and fix any critical crashing and hanging bugs in the latest OpenOffice.org code that our donors find and post.

Occasionally, if there is popular demand for a very specific feature that can be implemented with only a little engineering work like expanded Services menu support, we will implement it. However, redesigning the OpenOffice.org UI is something that Oracle's engineers have been struggling to do over the past year even with their 50+ engineering staff.

Patrick