OpenOffice.org Newspaper Ad Mockup Released

Benjamin Horst writes "The volunteer effort raising $10,000 to place at least two backpage ads in New York City's free daily paper Metro is now entering its second full week. We've collected over 10% of our goal already and continue to find new pledge donors at a healthy pace. Our project's purpose is to help 'cross the chasm' and bring awareness of OpenOffice.org 2.0 to the large number of computer users who stand to benefit from its broad feature set and range of useful capabilities. This is not the first time an open source project has sought a high-profile newspaper ad buy. In fact, our effort was directly inspired by the Firefox New York Times ad. Firefox's famous effort announcing its arrival on the world stage helped push it from about 10 million downloads to its current tally of over 185 million!"

Re:Is it

[Sen.NullProcPntr]

"I dont think so especially with the poor design they show on their mockup. Personnally I find this ad totally non-informative. More, maybe it's because I'm canadian but I think the "They'd download it" is totally inapropriate. Hell, they'd not download it, they don't know what's a computer."

From the fine web page;

"Your comments and feedback are requested and encouraged. Please submit them to the Google Group mentioned above so that all interested volunteers can participate in the discussion."

I don't know, it kind of looks like something you would see in a newspaper but if you can do better - let them know [google.com] about it!

More info available at this link

[christian.einfeldt]

Hi, I did an interview with Ben Horst for Mad Penguin. You can read the interview here, if you would like more info about Ben's effort to start this grassroots OOo ad campaign:

http://http//madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=7036/ [http]

Re:Is it

[alshithead]

Actually I'm using OpenOffice on a Windows XP system and it is slower than Office. My wife is using Office 2003 and it is faster on comparable hardware. That does NOT mean OpenOffice is the lesser application. It does everything I need it to and it didn't cost a cent. Meanwhile, I hate waiting but what the hell, an extra half a minute here and there doesn't amount to much for something that's FREE.

Wow

[imemyself]

The design for that looks fuglier than StarOffice 5 did. I mean, that had to really take some hard work to make something look that horrible. And the content isn't any better. "They'd download it." WTF were they thinking? If they actually put this ad in a paper, the best thing they can hope for is that people don't remember it. This could only have a negative impact on OOo's adoption among non-tech people.

well, this'll do, I guess

[misanthrope101]

I've been trying to figure out a place to tell someone about my favorite OpenOffice feature, and I guess you just nominated your post by mentioning PDF. I can copy/paste a web-page or selection into OpenOffice, and all the HTML links will be preserved. When I export to PDF, all the links are still preserved in the PDF! I've been using PDFcreator and printing to PDF for a couple of years, but that method loses all the links. But there's more...

Also, if I've structured an OpenOffice document by using styles (Heading 1, 2, 3), that creates bookmarks in the PDF document when I export it, even nesting the bookmarks in a hierarchy.

At least for this purpose, which I use a lot, OpenOffice is better than MS Office. I've been trying to figure out how to keep copies of web-pages with the links intact, or to keep a collection of Slashdot and Panda's Thumb posts while keeping the links, and OpenOffice works really well. Also, Openoffice can be run from a USB stick if you download the version from Portableapps.com. That beats the hell out of MS Office.

That has nothing to do with the article at hand. But don't you feel better anyway?

Re:Is it

[bunbuntheminilop]

Note that the firefox logo isn't part of the package. The logo is being used under licence from graphic designer John Hicks.

Re:Is it

[Anonymous Coward]

You can speed it up by navigating to the Tools-Options menu, selecting the "OpenOffice.org-Java" window, and unchecking "Use a Java runtime environment." It opens about twice as fast...