I'm new to this community, so please forgive me if the topic I'd like to discuss has already been aired.
To set the scene, first a bit of summarised, probably partisan and probably only partially accurate context. I point this out because I wouldn't want the thread to spin off into pedantic historic details and corrections. Having been around the computer industry for many years now, I have kept abreast of computing advancements by reading the industry news, developing products and using them. A pattern of acquisitions, mergers,aggregations, best practice, standards and plain copying has been going on so relentlessly that I believe that the fruits of these enterprises no longer adequately meet users needs as well as can be. The original modern interface (Xerox Star) didn't differentiate by application but by objects familiar to users. The application rot started with the commercial versions of this approach but really got application centric with Windows '95. My rough recollection is that MS Office started as a bunch of acquisitions that map pretty much to the applications we see now, whether MS, OOO or LO. That is; a word processor, a presentation manager, a spreadsheet and a database. Leaving the DB out of the argument for the moment, as a non presentation centric technology, I'd like to propose Libre Office consider a mid to long term strategy to ditch the artificial boundaries between applications. Let us return to the idea of supporting users' needs without filtering them through artificial application capabilities! Instead of applications, let's have a document, a variety of choices of rendering the document (print, screen, presentation, web, edit, collaborative edit, &c.) and tools. The tools can still be categorised, but not as they are in applications, where the application is a hard boundary. The tools here could all be used, irrespective of the presentation mechanism. Categorisation of the tools need only be done as a means to support user tasks, perhaps along multiple dimensions, using tags. This proposal means only having to develop a tool once and allowing the concurrent availability of tools that the artificial applications boundaries would normally exclude. For example, DTP tools, such as layout grids and text flow, which could be used alongside more traditional word processing tools in documents, presentations and other formats. Of course, the toolset and the rendering mechanisms could be extended in a modular way, making the development time-line much more appropriate to an open source community, with competition for tool developers to build a better tool. If the core design team act in an editorial and standards capacity, then the result can hang together seamlessly. (Apple seems to have cracked this a bit ;o) Enough rambling from me. I'd be really interested to see if there's anyone else who gets what I'm on about and whether there's enough interest to start investigating in more detail. If on the other hand you think I've got it all wrong, I'm happy to defend my views or admit defeat, depending on the feedback. If you read this far, well done :o) Cheers, Greg -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to design+h...@libreoffice.org List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/design/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***