On Tue, 2009-12-01 at 11:22 -0500, Anton Aylward wrote:
Adam Tauno Williams said the following on 12/01/2009 09:09 AM:
Now when you read reviews of things like OpenOffice it tends to be, for Most reviews are worthless page fill. On the whole, I find it hard to argue with that :-) the most part, a technical comparison, since the GUI looks pretty much I would never call most of the reviews I see as "technical comparisons". Most are little more than authors-gut-feeling or a collection about niggles regarding the authors favorite / least-favorite features. While true or the most part, there are many that list the features and all to many that compare them to how its done in Windows.
Perhaps, there are also many that are woe fully unqualified to write the articles they do. I'm frustrated by most OOo articles as someone who maintains 200+ page multi-part formal [toc + indexing + footnotes] documents in OOo. I feel pretty strongly that most of them are talking out their butt and have only the scantest familiarity with the product [one shouldn't be allowed to 'review' a product unless one actually *uses* it].
the same. Even reviewers who are Windows users think its a fair competitor. But when you read reviews of GIMP done by people from the Windows world they concentrate entirely on the GUI and slag the Gimp 'cos it has a different interface. Because the interface of an application does matter. a lot. In absolute terms, yes. Cars for the disabled don't have pedals for a very good reason. I've seen some antique cars that had too many levers and pedals and were confusing.
Yes. I own a 1919 Model-T Ford Depot Hack. And I have the steel plates screwed to my bones to prove it. User interface matters a lot! That was especially true when, before the distributor, you controlled both the fuel and the timing manually - it was trivially easy to seriously injure oneself [I landed about ~13 feet away from the car].
Because the point of the application is to do-work, and if a user can't sit down and do-work the value of the application is diminished. Time spent learning a radically different application is time spent not in do-work mode. Which was the point of the GUI. Early advertising for Microsoft Windows made the point that tools like WordPerfect and other "text mode" (though full screen) were obscure, depending on magical key combinations that were radically different.
All of which was true.
The Microsoft advertising made the point that the GUI had icons whose meaning was self-apparent (their words, not mine!), so making it easy of learn a new application.
I think just having clear menus helped more than icons, as well as dialogs and the ability to highlight with a mouse gesture. Icons get too much attention, they aren't what make a UI work.
Yes, in the real world we've gone back to the magic keystrokes so we don't have to take hands off the keyboard.
Power users have, or never left them. Most end-users I know don't even know the keystrokes for Cut / Paste.
But from the POV of a GUI that point still holds. The screen layout of OpenOffice Writer and its basic set of icons is pretty much the same as MS-Word of Office97 vintage.
And Office 97 looks a great deal like GeoWorks and Word Star did. Also I think you are underestimating Open Office which as Star Office dates back to the dates of CP/M on the Zilog Z80. Something recognizable existing on both MS-DOS, Windows, and OS/2. So, again, the "aping" charge is invalid.
There's a good case that moving to later versions of MS-Office requires more re-learning than moving from Office97 or Office2000 to the current version than it would to move to OpenOffice.
Sure, but I doubt that is the deal breaker. External product integration and file-format support is what I believe impedes Open Office most significantly.
Yes, GIMP is radically different from MS-Word. It brings in a whole slew of new concepts, like "layers"; like "brushes"; like "palettes". If anything, Inkscape is more like the art tools in MS-Word, dealing with objects: text is always text, and so forth.
GIMP's ontology is not different than that of Photoshop or other products - but until recent versions the UI was a radical departure with many floating windows. In that case "aping" was a good design decision. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org