Harold Fuchs wrote: > We can only comment on what we are shown. What I saw was terrible and I > said so. If what was shown does not represent the intentions then show > us what is intended. Philosophical arguments about UIs and context > sensitive menus are a waste of time and effort. The only thing that > counts is the *implemented* ergonomics. Show us what you plan to do, > with proper examples.
Again the misunderstanding about what a prototype is. If you created a petition that the new UI for OOo must not look like the prototype, I would be the first to sign it. But that's not the point. IMHO the prototype created so much resistance because it was not explained enough. BTW: I didn't present philosophical arguments about UI, I explained considerations about an operating philosophy, that's something completely different. It is essential to have an operating philosophy for your user interface. If you don't have one, you can only copy something from elsewhere, exactly what some people allege what is happening in Renaissance. Without outlining that we indeed have such operating philosophy was the only way I could think of that could explain that in fact we are *not* just copying. > My main objections are: > 1. The UI shown in the example took far too much screen space. Now this is exactly the way how we should talk about that. Indeed this is something I also don't like in what the prototype shows. IMHO we have to optimize that. > 2. The UI is far less important than many other things in OOo. If there > are resources available they should be deployed fixing major bugs and/or > implementing popularly requested enhancements. How many requests are > there for an improved UI compared to the number of requests for better > interoperability with MS Office for example? Or compared to the number > of requests for the properly implemented ability to allow multiple users > to work on the same document. Or for a cleaner mail-merge that doesn't, > for example, produce blank pages all over the place with no *obvious* > way to turn them off? This is the recurrent discussion about priorities. Ask 5 people, get 6 opinions. It won't help to discuss that further, and it will distract us from the matter we are discussing here. I hope you don't mind if I stay with the "Renaissance" topic. >> Too many people commented the blog entries that neither >> understood what a prototype is nor what the particular prototype in >> question wants to show. > > What *did* the prototype want to show? Why does it *need* an > explanation? I thought a picture is as good as a thousand words. You > seem to be saying we need a thousand words to explain a picture. Yes, sometimes this is true. Pictures can mislead, they often can be interpreted in different ways. If you think a few seconds I'm sure you will remember a lot of pictures that you would have misunderstood if nobody had given you some background information. But once you have this information, the picture indeed is better than thousand words. Regards, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS Please don't reply to "[email protected]". I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
