Hi everyone, I'm not really caught up on current OOo events, but I caught word (I tend to scan through some mailing list messages, don't really have time to read them all) that there's a OOo refresh in the making and was inspired to write an e-mail detailing what I think is important to get done: 1. *The UI* The UI is the single most important aspect of any piece of software. That's how Apple makes its money: its products aren't feature packed and its competitors usually already have the features its products have, but Apple's hardware and software are really intuitive and comfortable to use. The Renaissance project is shaping up really well. We need to get as many people as possible to test it, to provide feedback, and to look into more things we could do with the UI to make it more intuitive. 2. *The look* Self-explanatory. 3. *The "feel"/the code* OOo is infamous for being bloated. It's a famed memory and resource hog. So here are a few streamlining suggestions: a) Make secondary things into extensions. Take Google Chrome: it has put basic things like the RSS feed indicator into extensions. I think we should do a similar thing, but keep some of these basic extensions bundled in OOo (but they would now be easily removable). A few things which could be made into extensions: Wizards, templates, Gallery, Media player, Navigator, Language tools, Collaboration tools, Help files, etc. b) Use bits of the same code across the suite. (It's very peculiar that some things, like shapes or tables, don't work exactly the same way across all the applications, or that things like the zoom slider end up in one application several releases before another.) 4. *The website* The website holds the key to all of these, because that's where we get both volunteers and customers. The website needs to be completely rethought, from the ground up. The homepage needs a big, bright, warm download button and needs to be more resolution-independent and colorful (judging by the Feng-GUI heat map, where the OOo logo is the most distinctive part of the page) in general. The whole site needs to be recategorized and made browseable. All things related to projects (resources, mailing lists, links, wiki pages, ...) need to be collected into one lucid, readable, well-categorized project hub. Text needs to be drastically cut short, projects and mailing lists that have been broken up into so many parts need to be merged, and the new user routine has to be seriously simplified. Seriously, there is just so much unnecessary complexity on the site right now. And there needs to be an IdeaTorrent page, to provide a simple way to collect ideas from people (because the current idea submission procedure is too complicated and ineffective).
That's it. Of course, there are still problems like compatibility and feature parity with Office to tackle, but I'd say those are secondary (we've got the major compatibility problems solved, I think). I'm only concerned about the speed we accomplish this with: things have been moving pretty slowly around here, or so it seems. I think we could do things a lot faster with a website refresh. That's the thing we want to do first, because it'll get us more contributors. I'd especially appreciate the IdeaTorrent page. I'm also a bit concerned about online editing (with rising internet usage and speeds, as well as the game-changing, web app-only Chrome OS), but I've talked about that before... -- This is a site which donates money to a custom charity when you search (Google or Yahoo!): http://www.neoaid.com/
