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."

The actual proposal

[Kadin2048]

If anyone else was looking for the guy's actual proposal that was submitted to the competition, this is it:

http://www.koffice.org/competition/gui1results/mar tin_pfeiffer.pdf [koffice.org]

Frankly I think a lot of what he suggests strike me as rather "duh" concepts -- things which ought to be rather obvious but are ignored in some of the major office suites. I'm not sure how I feel about an application having a "desktop" which is separate from the actual OS' desktop; 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.

Re:The actual proposal

[critter_hunter]

StarOffice 5 (and possibly other versions) had an internal desktop and it was mind-numbingly useless.

Re:uhgg

[fossa]

From what I understand of interaction design, it's hard work. You can't have a contest "design an interface" and be done with it. That might be a start, if the design is based on observation. The next step would be to start implementing and bring users in for testing early on; then change the design as needed and keep testing. The design must be an iterative process. This is of course difficult with software; many use patterns may not be visible in the short term so I imagine it's easy to draw the wrong conclusions from the observations...

Re:It's not shiney enough.

[TubeSteak]

Have you ever seen the crap most stores, banks, warehouses use?

The software they run U G L Y.

Blue background and gray text... perhaps so you won't notice when you BSOD. My local bank is using software originally programmed for Win95 machines.

A lot of data entry and POS (point of sale) software looks horrible outdated, but it gets the job done. Go Figure.

Re:Check it out

[mandolin]

I would say it's a shame that OO.org runs on proprietary operating systems. Why should good Free software help M$ and Apple sell operating systems?

If you really want to look at it that way, think about how it would "help" MS lose an MS Office sale.

Re:Check it out

[SirTalon42]

The cygwin port of KDE is dead. KDE 4 is using the native windows version of Qt 4 (Qt4 is GPL on all platforms).

Wow, I like this very much.

[furry_wookie]

I thought these were great concepts myself:

http://www.koffice.org/competition/gui1results/mor itz_zimmermann.pdf [koffice.org]

Re:KDE

[Poltras]

Try this [google.com].

Re:It's not shiney enough.

[ozmanjusri]

I want something lean and fast. Seems that's becoming more and more rare these days.

No, software doesn't wear out. When new software with bells and whistles is released, it adds to the amount of choices available to you, but nobody's forcing you to install the new apps.

In the office software arena, there are plenty of lightweight apps and suites if you're prepared to look. Abiword, Sphygmic spreadsheet, Siag office, the Softmaker suite or even Ragtime, for some definitions of lightweight...

Re:Koffice only has one disadvantage

[AusIV]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but generally exporting PDFs from a word processing standpoint is fairly different from print drivers. I have PDF995 for windows (a print driver that creates a PDF), and the PDF is basically a picture of the document. OpenOffice, on the other hand, will let me export straight from a document to PDF. The file is smaller and renders better on a larger scale because it uses text rather than an image.

I've not used KDE's PDF printer, but since you get to it from the print menu, I'd think the result would be more similar to a PDF995 PDF than exporting straight to PDF using OpenOffice.

Re:Check it out

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure the delayed release for Windows and OSX was due to Trolltech's disallowing of Qt being used in non-free operating systems without a license. Qt 4 fixed that

No, you still need a license. The difference with Qt 4 is that they are offering Windows Qt under the GPL, whereas before it was only available under the GPL on other operating systems.

Re:Koffice only has one disadvantage

[Lusa]

I shall! It sounds like that PDF995 software has taken a very naive approach to PDF creation. Both Adobe's printer driver and the one available to KDE create proper PDF documents where the text remains as text. I just 'printed' the jsr 170 spec (something like 238 pages) from kpdf. The generated PDF was 1.6MB to the original 2.3MB, also the text in the generated file was still selectable.

Re:It's not shiney enough.

[Saanvik]

Nope, nice try, though. WordPerfect was the source of grey on blue. I believe they went with grey on blue in 1982 with 2.20, but they definitely had it in 1986. Word did imitate WordPerfect, just like WordPerfect imitated WordStart earlier.