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NeoOffice :: View topic - Will neoOffice have a native "Cocoa" look & fe
Will neoOffice have a native "Cocoa" look & fe
 
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Morishani
Blue Pill


Joined: May 30, 2009
Posts: 3

PostPosted: Sat May 30, 2009 9:06 am    Post subject: Will neoOffice have a native "Cocoa" look & fe

Recently NetBeans IDE team done something great, They gave to NetBeans a native Cocoa look.

NeoOffice is great, but why keep the old java look?

Is there any plans to do something like NetBeans done?[/url]
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Sat May 30, 2009 9:25 am    Post subject: Re: Will neoOffice have a native "Cocoa" look &

Morishani wrote:
Recently NetBeans IDE team done something great, They gave to NetBeans a native Cocoa look.

NeoOffice is great, but why keep the old java look?

Is there any plans to do something like NetBeans done?


Huh? That NetBeans screen snapshot does not look like it is using native Mac OS X controls at all. The only native controls that they appear to be using is the dropdown listbox and the search box. The rest are non-native controls.

I also do not understand by what you mean by NeoOffice's "java look" as NeoOffice draws native Mac OS X buttons, scrollbars, checkboxes, etc. using native Mac OS X functions.

Patrick
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Morishani
Blue Pill


Joined: May 30, 2009
Posts: 3

PostPosted: Sat May 30, 2009 9:47 am    Post subject: Re: Will neoOffice have a native "Cocoa" look &

pluby wrote:

Huh? That NetBeans screen snapshot does not look like it is using native Mac OS X controls at all. The only native controls that they appear to be using is the dropdown listbox and the search box. The rest are non-native controls.

I also do not understand by what you mean by NeoOffice's "java look" as NeoOffice draws native Mac OS X buttons, scrollbars, checkboxes, etc. using native Mac OS X functions.

Patrick


Thanks for the fast answer.

I mean, the metal look that every cocoa application have.

The popup menus are native too. the toolbar doesn't look "java"-like (gray - white gradient back)

I think that the differences between neo/openOffice and any other "cocoa" like (Ex. NetBeans)

A older image of NetBeans on mac for comparison.
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Sat May 30, 2009 9:58 am    Post subject: Re: Will neoOffice have a native "Cocoa" look &

Morishani wrote:
I mean, the metal look that every cocoa application have.


Ah, I understand what you are asking. When you said "Cocoa", I thought you were asking when we would use Mac OS X's Cocoa programming API and since NeoOffice already used native Cocoa windows, buttons, scrollbars, etc., I was confused.

So, to answer your question, we have no plans to implement a the Metal look and feel in NeoOffice at this time.

Unfortunately, our very limited funding and developer resources limits the current scope of the NeoOffice project to keeping a native version of OpenOffice.org running on Mac OS X and implementing the Metal look and feel in NeoOffice would require resources that we just do not have.

Patrick
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Morishani
Blue Pill


Joined: May 30, 2009
Posts: 3

PostPosted: Sat May 30, 2009 9:59 am    Post subject: Re: Will neoOffice have a native "Cocoa" look &

pluby wrote:
Morishani wrote:
I mean, the metal look that every cocoa application have.


Ah, I understand what you are asking. When you said "Cocoa", I thought you were asking when we would use Mac OS X's Cocoa programming API and since NeoOffice already used native Cocoa windows, buttons, scrollbars, etc., I was confused.

So, to answer your question, we have no plans to implement a the Metal look and feel in NeoOffice at this time.

Unfortunately, our very limited funding and developer resources limits the current scope of the NeoOffice project to keeping a native version of OpenOffice.org running on Mac OS X and implementing the Metal look and feel in NeoOffice would require resources that we just do not have.

Patrick


Oh, OK. I'm still going to use neoOffice, but i figured it would be very nice with the metal look, never mind Smile

Thanks for the fast response again.
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samuelgordon
Blue Pill


Joined: May 30, 2009
Posts: 1

PostPosted: Sat May 30, 2009 12:56 pm    Post subject:

I wanted to ask almost the same but I'm more curious why someone doesn't solve details, such as: (in NeoOffice Writer) why are used such big Combo boxes? These currently used are in Interface Builder named as Regular, but Small would look much better! These are just too big and really ugly! You can take a look at my attachment, if you are not sure what I mean.

And the next thing is more general: the sizes of buttons and the layout of all objects of windows. For example, the whole Preferences window looks terrible. It's so inconsistent... It's not Mac-like at all Sad

I understand, all of these things are just details and there are bunch of more important features to develop but (especially for Mac users) the appearance of applications is very important as well.
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Sat May 30, 2009 1:15 pm    Post subject:

samuelgordon wrote:
I wanted to ask almost the same but I'm more curious why someone doesn't solve details, such as: (in NeoOffice Writer) why are used such big Combo boxes? These currently used are in Interface Builder named as Regular, but Small would look much better! These are just too big and really ugly! You can take a look at my attachment, if you are not sure what I mean.

And the next thing is more general: the sizes of buttons and the layout of all objects of windows. For example, the whole Preferences window looks terrible. It's so inconsistent... It's not Mac-like at all Sad

I understand, all of these things are just details and there are bunch of more important features to develop but (especially for Mac users) the appearance of applications is very important as well.


I believe I already stated why NeoOffice is not working on these type of issues but I will repeat it hear again:

Unfortunately, our very limited funding and developer resources limits the current scope of the NeoOffice project to keeping a native version of OpenOffice.org running on Mac OS X.

We are donation funded project which means we do what we can with the donations that are users give us. For the past several years our users have donated basically just enough to allow us to keep integrating new features from OpenOffice.org, fixing critical crashing and hanging bugs, and answer user support questions.

No funds exist to take on the massive task of customizing OpenOffice.org hundreds of cross-platform dialogs, menus, and toolbars to be tailored to the Mac.

Patrick
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carpenpa
Red Pill


Joined: Aug 19, 2009
Posts: 5

PostPosted: Mon Sep 14, 2009 3:19 pm    Post subject: Pages / metal type toolbar appearance

Fully understand and recognise the reasons for NeoOffice concentrating on the development issues and support that you provide (and we all really appreciate).

What sort of funding would be required to develop a toolbar interface that looks more like Pages and other Mac apps? Is the situation that whatever funding was made available there would not be the manpower available to implement and maintain these changes or would it be possible to poll for additional funds for such a project to see if enough people would want it badly enough?
Just a thought Very Happy
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Mon Sep 14, 2009 4:53 pm    Post subject: Re: Pages / metal type toolbar appearance

carpenpa wrote:
What sort of funding would be required to develop a toolbar interface that looks more like Pages and other Mac apps? Is the situation that whatever funding was made available there would not be the manpower available to implement and maintain these changes or would it be possible to poll for additional funds for such a project to see if enough people would want it badly enough?


Realistically, I think such an interface change would require massive changes at all levels of NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org. I am not sure what such an effort would cost, but Sun Microsystem's OpenOffice.org group employees several dozen engineers, testers, and documentation writers, I assume that their current annual cost to run OpenOffice.org is probably several million U.S. dollars. Additionally, Novell's Go-oo engineering group probably spends nearly a million U.S. annually.

Since all of that engineering staff at OpenOffice.org and Novell's Go-oo group only yields small, incremental feature changes, I suspect that doing a major overhaul would require all of that stafffing's full attention for at least a year or two. That is a massive amount of work to fund so I believe that only a large software company like IBM or Apple could afford to invest that kind of money.

If they invested that kind of money I believe that most likely they would be very motivated to recoup that large investment by either close sourcing the code and selling a proprietary version (as Apple has done with iWork) or by charging very high support fees (as IBM is trying to do with Symphony).

Patrick
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