KOffice GUI Competition Winner

Boudewijn Rempt writes "The KOffice GUI Competition has been won by Martin Pfeiffer. His entry was chosen from eighteen submissions by the jury because of its innovative, ground-breaking approach to workflow and document handling. Many submitters broke away from the beaten path and explored wild and wonderful ideas. The results page also has all submitted entries available for review."

Koffice only has one disadvantage

[xenoterracide]

the lack of filetype's suppported. It doesn't, I think support exporting to pdf, nor does it support .doc. This is it's only real drawbacks. Otherwise I am starting to like it better than OpenOffice especially because it has the office feature I wanted. tabs so I can have multiple documents open in one window at once. Which is what I want as otherwise I almost end up with several office windows open at once and it gets so cluttered.

uhgg

[Aqua OS X]

This is the first time I've heard of this contest. I would've been nice if they made an effort to publicize it within the industrial and graphic design communities (ie IDSA and AIGA for starters).

I can't say that I'm very impressed with the winner or any of the runner ups. The OS community should seize the opportunity to accept and leverage professional interactive design.

The commercial software industry doesn't do this very well... does it's make sense to exploit this weakness?

Re:The actual proposal

[Anonymous Coward]

it seems like it would lead to a situation where every application has its own desktop, possibly with conflicting UI metaphors, and that's not a good end result for the user.

That would [protopage.com] never [palm.com] ever [chrischandler.com] happen [google.com].

We want verifiable results

[bogaboga]

Those folks at KDE/KOffice actually listen to user input or criticisms. That's good. So I'd like them to solve this issue once and for all.

The issue is to do with fonts. I'd like to have a situation where the entire KDE desktop respects fonts selected by the still missing font manager. Right now, we have two areas where fonts can be configured and these are not [neccessarily] respected by all KDE apps! A wish issue has already been submitted.

Re:It's not shiney enough.

[Tourney3p0]

In that case, I don't want an Office killer. I want something lean and fast. Seems that's becoming more and more rare these days.

Re:It's not shiney enough.

[Coryoth]

sure, it might enhance productivity, but if you want an MSFT office killer you need the pretty visuals to win people over.

What you need is "can't live without it once you've used it" features that aren't available elsewhere. I would have to say, after reading through his PDF submission, that, at the very least, there is the beginnings of a much more overview and workflow oriented approach to working with office documents that could be exceptionally powerful. Yes it needs to be implemented well and have decent scope. Ideally some manner of workflow view for an entire corpus of related documents - reports, spreadsheets, presentations, the lot - would be ideal. It takes a little imagination to see the full possibilities, but I think they really might be on to something here, and I am keen to see the final results.

Jedidiah.

What I'd like

[reason]

Not sure I agree with some of the ideas in the winning entry: most people don't want to work in full page view by default, for instance, since most of us are stuck with monitors and eyesight that make full-page view uncomfortable for reading.

What I'd really like to see is a tool to remember what documents are associated with different projects. When I'm working on my "river1" report, for instance, I want to have "river1 draft manuscript.doc", "river1 budget.xls" and "river1 project plan.doc" open for easy access, and Matlab up with the path set to the river1 directory. I should be able to do all this with a single click.

When I'm working on the "Lake Suchandsuch" project, I want to be able to open a different set of tools and documents with one click: perhaps a putty terminal connected to my high performance computer account, a gvim window with "buggy code.c" open, and a PDF of a scientific manuscript with details of the algorithm I am trying to implement. Does anyone know of a tool that can do this?

Re:Check it out

[SirTalon42]

KOffice 2.0 (to be released for KDE4) will be able to run natively on X11, Windows, and OS X (no X server layer on OS X I believe).

Re:The actual proposal

[Ecko7889]

I did in fact read the entire PDF. It was interesting read with some very technical details. Alot of the information is very relevant to working on a document. A lot of users only use the icons as a source of editing. If they can't find the icon, they have to go wander through menus, which cause some hassle. I would like to be able to see more drag and drop functions. He stated in his PDF that he would like to integrate the concept of "desk space". Mimic how you would handle many documents spread out on your desk. This can be very influencial in how the mouse interacts with the documents.

It will be a nice concept, that will hopefully spawn more user friendly and easier to edit documents. I don't know how many times, I use OO.o, and wonder why they haven't tried anything new when it comes to GUI. There are a lot of problems with programs failing to try and "learn" the habits of a specific user. If I happen to use a certain tool a lot more than others. I want the icon to be on the toolbar if it isn't already. They are making improvements, but it will be a while before a dynamically created GUI specific to a user is automatically done over time.

When the program is your COMPLETE bitch, only then is it right to use.

Re:Koffice only has one disadvantage

[diegocgteleline.es]

Of course it supports exporting to PDF; all KDE applications does.

Actually, kword can open PDF files, which is something that openoffice still can't do AFAIK.

Re:It's not shiney enough.

[Petrushka]

Presumably it's because they're used to it. Some word processor in the early 90s made white-on-blue almost a standard -- was it an early version of WordPerfect, or was it Word? I forget. Anyway, it's still an option in current versions of Microsoft Word (Tools - Options - General), and you can set OOo up that way too if you want, though that requires a bit more effort. Anyway, yuck.

Some difference from iWorks??!

[hotfireball]

Sorry for my blindness. But does somebody can point me the difference in the principle between this proposal and Apple iWorks already developed? I see the same style drawer, same page thumbnailer and so on. Currently I see worse iWorks clone, since iWorks/Pages2 offers you better working space since you use only the tools you need actually.

IMHO, @ KDE there was much better proposals than this one.

Am I missing something?..

Internal desktop

[sinewalker]

Well, I agree that the internal desktop (and the MDI interface model in general) sucks, but is it a bad idea, or is it just an unworkable implementation of a good idea? The good points of the internal desktop were that the different document types could be made to work together in a fasion that the OS doesn't seem able to do (the office suite is able to get at the meta-data and internals of your documents, and facilitates good indexing and integration of the documents -- but the OS just shows you filename/type/size and a date). The bad points are that the "Office" desktop and the "Real/OS" desktop are as seperate from each other as the "Physical" desktop items that your computer sits upon. So if you have a document that isn't produced from one of the suite's programes, it becomes difficult to locate and use it in the office desktop. I would like to see the some of the ideas from SO5 and the winner's proposals migrate into the actual OS desktop. Unfortunately that would mean sharing meta-knowledge of the documents between the OS and the office apps, and would effectively end the cross-platform goals for KOffice and OOo.

Call it sour grapes...

[Overly Critical Guy]

I'm hugely disappointed; I sent my PDF entry to three email addresses, even contacted Ingwa on IRC for confirmation of receiving my entry, and it's still not shown on the results page. I wonder if they ever received it.

I don't know if my idea sucked or was plain and obvious, but it's a huge bummer it's not even on the results page for some reason, as though they never received it. Mine was an interface reorganization with an emphasis on a context-sensitive area to keep things familiar and free of clutter (first thing to go was that horrible toolbar).

I can't believe all this time I've been sitting here thinking they were reading it. I put a lot of work into it. I wonder what the heck happened. :-(

Since it doesn't matter now, I offer it to Slashdot. Click here to read my entry in original PDF form [scaredlittleboy.org] if you want to check it out. Let me know what you think. It's nothing revolutionary, but it's not intended to be. These crazy experimental office interfaces are exactly what the user doesn't need.

Man, what a disappointment that they never even got it. Figures. But hey, I offer mine here as GPL too--if someone wants to use it for something, go right ahead.

Re:The actual proposal

[Anonymous Coward]

Be fair. Google Desktop doesn't try to replace or recreate the desktop; it's just an overgrown toolbar that sits on Windows's desktop. And Palm Desktop doesn't even have a "desktop" like the parent is referring to. Are you just linking to anything with "desktop" in its name, regardless of whether it actually has its own internal desktop or not?

Re:The sorry state of Open Source user interfaces

[Coryoth]

Nearly every single one of my UI-related annoyances from Red Hat 5.1 and Mandrake 6.0 is still in Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, etc. today, along with quite a few new ones from the various half-assed attempts at making things easier for newbies.

Out of curiousity, what are the various UI-related annoyances that are kicking around still? I'm not arguing, I'm just honestly curious as to what bugs you - maybe I, or someone, can try and help fix some of it.

Jedidiah.

Re:In search of the elusive paper replacement

[tilde_e]

I agreed with this 100%. Then I went back and read it and found that document does reference pen and paper and it also says "All these thoughts and ideas have one common goal: Reduce the users effort while creating a document. The user should only enter the data e.g. the text and define a layout and a structure. He should concentrate on the things that matter."

But as a synthesis on top of what I gather is the spirit of your comment, jotting ideas is naturally messy, and the act of refining and reflecting on these ideas before they are crystalized is an important part of the process. But since this interface might be so efficient with all of its patterns, someone will have made a permanent visual design decision while still in the middle of writing the content. That piece of paper in your pocket is the equivalent of the software throw-away prototype which should never be released (yeah right that rule never gets violated).

So it may turn out that this doesn't promote any process, but instead it creates a One-Stop Document Shop -- like email, it can be written and delivered before the author has even had time to realize what ended up in the document. (I just searched the document and didn't find any reference to KMail, I would have expected some challenge to Outlook in this integration.) On the other hand, when a word processor is too hard to use, the user might just click a template button, enter some content and press print.

BTW, while we're rethinking the word processor, isn't the save button antiquated? Shouldn't the application be journaling all my actions and if it crashes it opens in the exact state it left? There should really be more of a tagged version scheme where versions are explicitly tagged, but many more versions are automatically created and garbage collected over time when they aren't tagged for keeping. I would have to be retrained if this was implemented because I currently have a habit of hitting Ctrl + S pretty much after each mental breath I take.

Here's my usage model:
I immediately turn on the paragraph marks, get rid of a toolbars and menus and make the document full screen. The paragraph marks add extra noise to the document to help keep the flow going and make the big blank document not so intimidating.

It's only after I have at least a page of content before I start breaking it up with headings or however else I need to start bring more form to the document.

Re:The actual proposal

[Anonymous Coward]

I wanted to share an inspiration I got from reading Pfeifers paper -- when he talked about KOffice documents being zipped combinations of various file types represented by some sort of DOM, I thought it was lame to force joe user to still think in terms of an object in the filesystem.

What if KOffice could represent a complex koffice document in a virtual manner, the same way KDE media:// ioslaves can represent one audio CD as several virtual collections or the way amarok breaks down my music collection into several smart lists.

That is my new koffice view of a complex document could be represented simply as "(all) What I worked on last week", "Code-review of project-x for next week", "Your 2-weekly status notes for tomorrows meeting", disguising the fact each of those 'views' represents a mix of docs, sheets, slides, journal and calendar entries, etc.

Re:Call it sour grapes...

[Overly Critical Guy]

That was the very idea. I believe KOffice simply needs some cleaning up. The temptation is to invent some radical new paradigm, but we don't reinvent books or automobiles, do we? Their interfaces have well-defined paradigms that we're all familiar with. I thought it best to pack all the esoteric functionality away into a side column of controls that appears based on context, divided into two modes of editing and annotation, and to clean up everything else so that there are at most five large buttons on the toolbar, and you can find the functionality you need in the sidebar (and if it's really esoteric, it's in the menus).

The contest called only for an interface redesign searching for ideas that may be implemented in KOffice 2; perhaps it wouldn't have mattered either way if my submission went through, but I gave the link for anyone curious. Sidebars are hardly new, but I tried my best to document a set of workflow behaviors for each application to follow that makes the sidebar a useful tool. You can make things easier to remember for users, and that will go a long way toward speeding up their productivity. Office 12, despite its ribbon controls, is still a massive orgy of toolbar buttons that you'll hunt and peck through because it's all exposed at once. I tried to organize functionality so that you're always looking at only the functions you need at the time, yet you can easily move to a different set when needed (like clicking the Wrap tab to get functions to modify an object's layout, or clicking the List tab to format it as a bullet item).

Functional clarity

[KlaymenDK]

Even though I may sound just like my fellow posts here, I wanted to drop you a comment.

I must say that your PDF reads much like an Apple GUI guideline, and not like something intended for KDE. What I mean to say is that it shows how much you value functional clarity (perhaps too much so, in the eyes of /.ers and KDEians). Anyhow, kudos to you; you should submit those ideas to another project that is more willing to apply, well, functional clarity.