Hello, I was flabbergasted by the forced-unto-us not-so-functional online help system, as you might have read several times on this list. This is something that mostly targets the non-English speaking communities (at least on Linux and OS X) - and we were not asked how the end product should look like. Since it was implemented there were no major enhancements and the non-functionality of that online help is still obvious to all. Now the thing will go further: http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~kendy/blog/archives/monthly/2011-03.html#2011-03-31T11_35_21.htm What are the OFFICIAL specs, confirmed by the LibreOffice community for further development of the online help? What is "our approach", who is "us"? Does it include us, the L10N community, translating and updating the help, or who? Did the L10N teams leads give their perspective on this issue?
The online help system developer has also revamped the search toolbar "to behave more like in [...] Firefox": http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~kendy/blog/archives/monthly/2011-03.html#2011-03-29T09_43_06.htm and he is now also mentoring students cleaning the UI. While some tasks in http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Gsoc/Ideas#UI_cleanup look like real cleanup, some might really be re-designs. I am wondering if LO is (unlike OOo) going in the direction that every developer can change the UI without consent from the community. (That could lead to LO developers thinking loud on their blogs like this: "Playing with the LO code yesterday I decided that LO will now drop the Base component, because I don't like it, it just takes place on disk, it should be an extension.") Or maybe there are some individuals (or employees of some companies) with greater rights and privileges than others in the LO community? Should not the UI changes be discussed in length? With some usability studies etc.? Will the disappointment with the decision-making process lead to further forks of LibreOffice or to the return of translation teams back to the OOo project? I am writing here, because I think this is not a single-developer decision nor just a GUI/developer-people-thing, and because I would like to know the official specs for the Help and GUI redesign/cleanup as well as the opinion of the L10N teams, because international help system is very much in the hands of the L10N teams. I do like Kendy and his commitment to this project, I do know that he means well and is spending a lot of time working on the development of LibreOffice. But some things just need major consensus of all the people deeply involved. Maybe there should be a sandbox for that kind of enhancements and people should then vote if they like the feature enough so it would be further developed and included into vanilla LO. Thank you for your time and attention. Martin -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to l10n+h...@libreoffice.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/l10n/ *All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted*