Posted: Tue May 18, 2010 11:05 am Post subject: True Full Screen writing?
My wish for Neooffice would be the addition true full screen writing. If you have ever experienced the full screen function of MacJournal, you know what I am talking about. A completely blank screen, free of all distractions, just you and your text. For a writer, this is a great joy.
The first step we need to do is determine if your new feature request is feasible to implement in NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code. Our donations only support one full-time software engineer (me) so we can only devote our limited engineering time to features so first we need to figure out roughly how much work the new feature would require to be implemented.
Before I can determine if it is feasible, I need to make sure that I understand what would need to be changed. When I read "true full screen writing", my feeling was that you were asking for the existing feature in Writer's View :: Full Screen menu to do the following additional things:
1. Display the full screen window without a titlebar or resize box and have that window cover the Mac OS X menubar and Dock
2. Hide all scrollbars and rulers (toolbars and the status bar are already hidden)
3. Expand the zoom size of the page so that the background surrounding the page gets pushed out of view.
Did I understand the scope of this new feature request? Or am I missing any other changes that would be needed?
Posted: Thu May 20, 2010 8:56 pm Post subject: True Full Screen
First, let me say, thank you for all that you do.
Yes, I think what you are describing is approximately it. In MacJournal you face a full screen of white (or some other color if you choose), wall to wall in both the horizontal and vertical directions. Rather than zooming the page, I think this accomplished by presenting approximately one or 3/4 page of text on the screen with much larger than usual margins on the left and right.
The menu bar at the top of the screen is normally hidden under the white, but it you click up there on the top of the screen the menu bar appears and can be used. Clicking back down on the writing area makes the menu bar disappear again.
Finally, when the amount of text in the file is more than can be displayed on a single screen, a simple scroll bar emerges on the right hand side of the screen.
I am not sure of the exact amount of work that would be needed to implement this new feature but I am now confident that am pretty confident that this feature is feasible to implement. The bad news is that I suspect that the engineering work to modify NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code to add this feature is not trivial.
Our donations only support one full-time software engineer (me) so we can only devote our limited engineering time to features that are likely to generate enough new donations to reimburse the NeoOffice project for the time spent implementing them.
In order for us to feel comfortable that we will recoup the engineering cost that is needed to implement this new feature from future donations, we need to see at a reasonable number of NeoOffice donors post that they also want this feature added to NeoOffice.
If we see at least 20 other NeoOffice donors post support for this new feature, then we will have a pretty good level of confidence that the new feature will generate the necessary donations and I will then start working on the new feature.
Is this a feature that any other NeoOffice donors want to see added to NeoOffice? If so, please let us know.
OK, well, since I requested it, I am willing to put up $100 to make this happen. I am sure that is nowhere near enough, but perhaps others will contribute, too.
OK, well, since I requested it, I am willing to put up $100 to make this happen. I am sure that is nowhere near enough, but perhaps others will contribute, too.
I appreciate your offer and we always appreciate large donations, but since my estimate is that this new feature will require about $10,000 to $20,000 after all of the bugs are found through testing and support requests, what we really need to see is more donors tell us that this is something they will appreciate seeing in NeoOffice.
So one of two things is happening here: very few other donors feel they need your requested feature and, instead, they want us to focus our limited donations on other features or, and this is a possibility, very few donors are paying attention to the the NeoOffice New Feature Requests forum.
My suggestion is to give your new feature request time to be noticed by your fellow donors. Given that most donors only come by here occasionally, even the most popular new feature requests can take a month or two to reach the necessary votes.
In the meantime, if you have your own blog, Twitter group, etc., it never hurts to lobby your fellow NeoOffice users to vote for your new feature request.
I've just been playing with MacJournal to see what their full-screen implementation is like, and it's pretty well thought out, and lets you do more or less everything you can do in window mode (including image insertion etc. using dialogues) - but it's really oriented towards undistracted text editing.
I think if OpenOffice/NeoOffice were to implement this functionality, there'd have to be a lot of careful planning and user consultation first to see how it would be most useful to implement it - there are all kinds of issues that make full-screen apps helpful or tiresome to use.
For a start, would this just be in Writer? If not, how would you implement full-screen for Calc, Draw, Impress, etc.? Would they need to/be able to work differently from each other? Certainly I depend a lot on floating toolbars when I'm using Draw/Impress, but mainly on menu items and shortcuts when using Writer and Calc.
Personally, I've only ever really found full-screen useful for text editing without distraction (and PhotoShop, of course).
I'm just throwing thoughts into the ring to get some user-discussion going about what we might want out of this, so in the longer run it'll be easier to see how much work would be involved (and so the devs can get on with the real stuff in the meantime ).
Just as a side issue (sort of), I've found it more useful to use an app like Isolator, which fades all the background (and background apps) whatever your foreround app is. This gives me system-wide control over what I'm focusing on, without having to lose the familiarity of each app's interface - and I still have access to drag-and-drop functionality, because you can set the opacity of the background fading.
Thanks yoxi for your support of this request. Isolator looks interesting, particularly when working with a large monitor with multiple applications running. The full screen editing that I am talking about is quite different, however. I recommend others check out MacJournal to see what I am requesting. http://marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=85 . It really makes writing a pleasure.
FYI. If you upgraded your machine to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, NeoOffice 3.2.1 Beta supports Lion's new Full-Screen feature. Note, however, that this new feature only works if you have Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
in full screen "distraction free" mode, i think it should only be writing. sure it is nice you can do some formatting, but the real purpose is to remove everything but the text. (so no spreadsheets or presentation)
MJ does this very well, i think. I use the black background, green letters. there are no page breaks, just margins on the side (which you can set)
while the 10.7 full screen helps with spreadsheets and presentations because of the way they are presented on the screen, it doesn't offer this kind of presentation for the writer.
So now that Lion has solved one part of this new feature request (hiding the window titlebar and toolbars), I think the next step is to answer the following:
1. Do any other donors want to be able to make NeoOffice Writer behave similar to MacJournal when in Full-Screen mode? So far savys and jakeOSX have requested this feature. If we see maybe 10 donors post that they would like to see MacJournal behavior, then we can move to the next question.
2. If there is interest, the next question is can we emulate MacJournal's document layout using any of NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org settings. For example, if we changed the code to automatically enable NeoOffice's View :: Web Layout menu, does that get close to the "no distractions" editing that MacJournal has? If so, are there other settings that we can enable like document background color, etc.?
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