OpenOffice.org 2.0 splashscreen competition winner announced

[Posted February 23, 2005 by corbet]

From:		Louis Suarez-Potts <louis-AT-openoffice.org>
To:		announce-AT-openoffice.org, dev-AT-native-lang.openoffice.org, dev-AT-marketing.openoffice.org, dev-AT-openoffice.org, discuss <discuss-AT-openoffice.org>
Subject:		[ooo-announce] Winner, OpenOffice.org 2.0 Splashscreen Competition
Date:		Wed, 23 Feb 2005 11:53:32 -0800

All,

Thousands of OpenOffice.org community members participated in the voting
for the OpenOffice.org 2.0 splashscreen. People could vote for their
favourite three choices from the eleven splashscreens shortlisted form
over 340 submissions from 103 artists and designers.

We are pleased to announce that Brendan Wheelan was the outright winner
with his splashscreen design:
http://www.openoffice.org/editorial/bwhelan.html

Brendan, a professional programmer, has since worked with the
development team to finalise the artwork to be included in
OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta, including the splashscreen, about box and
installer graphics.

The splashscreen competition not only provided a successful
splashscreen, but created awareness of the OpenOffice.org Art Project
(http://marketing.openoffice.org/art/) that is responsible for the
creation and maintenance of graphics and art pieces for the
OpenOffice.org community.

Thank you to all the artists who participated in the splashscreen
competition. We look forward to any other ways you may wish to
contribute to the OpenOffice.org Art Project.

Congratulations Brendan, and a big thank you also to all the community
members who participated in voting for the splashscreen.

Regards
Jacqueline McNally
Lead, OpenOffice.org Marketing Project

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OpenOffice.org 2.0 splashscreen competition winner announced

Posted Feb 23, 2005 20:58 UTC (Wed) by cantsin (guest, #4420) [Link] (6 responses)

I fail to see a major difference to the previous splash screen, except that the new one uses more shades of blue (and thus will likely look worse on low color depth displays).

Apart from that, it would be better if free software programs would do without splash screens altogether. They seem a bad in-the-face corporate advertising habit from the proprietary software world to me. Instead of the programs themselves, desktop frameworks like KDE and Gnome should take care of busy or loading progress indicators, in a consistent manner.

Florian

OpenOffice.org 2.0 splashscreen competition winner announced

Posted Feb 23, 2005 21:06 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (5 responses)

A launch time under two seconds ought to be possible for most desktop applications, but sometimes it is out of the author's control. The splash screen is meant to hide the delay.

Splashscreens and VNC interact poorly

Posted Feb 23, 2005 21:15 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

I've sometimes been in the position of giving a software demo with hundreds or even thousands of miles separating me from the server, with a mix of operating systems to boot. VNC is great for this, but splash screens with full color photos or gradients are horrible for VNC. If you must provide a splash screen for your app, don't forget to provide an option that turns it off. Even better would be a convention for causing all apps to omit their splash screens (standard command-line flag or environment variable).

OpenOffice.org 2.0 splashscreen competition winner announced

Posted Feb 23, 2005 21:33 UTC (Wed) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (3 responses)

The point was that the application shouldn't pop up its own splash. The desktop should use something akin to startup-notification to display an "Application Starting" indicator, be it a fancy hour-glass mouse cursor, blinking task-list entry, or even a splash screen. But that splash screen should be handled by the *desktop* that is implementing startup-notification. So, far example, GNOME might display the application name and icon (from its .desktop file) in a dialog with pulsating wonder-bits. If users dislike splash screens, they can change an option in their desktop settings that would then disable *all* splash screens (and possibly replace it with some other notification mechanism).

OpenOffice.org 2.0 splashscreen competition winner announced

Posted Feb 24, 2005 1:13 UTC (Thu) by gte223j (guest, #6492) [Link] (2 responses)

Good idea elanthis I wish it was doable. There is a major disadvantage.

How does the desktop *know* when the app is loading?

The app would have to tell the desktop. How would the app tell the desktop? There would have to be an interface. The developer would have to figure out which desktop(wm) was launching the app. It could be built into X for one standard interface, but there would probably be different standards though between the window managers. The coders would have to accomadate each one if they were so motivated.

I could see how most developers would grimace and say, "but our splash screen looks good............................and it works right now" :-)

OpenOffice.org 2.0 splashscreen competition winner announced

Posted Feb 24, 2005 1:39 UTC (Thu) by walters (subscriber, #7396) [Link] (1 responses)

Freedesktop.org is way ahead of you:

http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards_2fstartup_2dnotification_2dspec

OpenOffice.org 2.0 splashscreen competition winner announced

Posted Feb 24, 2005 16:48 UTC (Thu) by gte223j (guest, #6492) [Link]

Very Cool indeed. Thanks for pointing this out, i was unaware.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 splashscreen competition winner announced

Posted Feb 23, 2005 21:01 UTC (Wed) by euvitudo (guest, #98) [Link] (4 responses)

This new splashscreen looks an awful lot like the splashscreen for Adobe Acrobat 6.0 (windows version).

OpenOffice.org 2.0 splashscreen competition winner announced

Posted Feb 23, 2005 21:56 UTC (Wed) by pdsdst (subscriber, #19395) [Link] (1 responses)

Except for that ridiculously long list of patents.

Speeding up Windows Acrobat

Posted Feb 24, 2005 16:39 UTC (Thu) by southey (guest, #9466) [Link]

At least for the Windows version, you can relocate all but about three plugins from the plugin subdirectory to another, and, Acrobat loads very quickly. There are various web articles on this (eg:
http://codebetter.com/blogs/darrell.norton/archive/2003/1...) as this slightly varies between versions.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 splashscreen competition winner announced

Posted Feb 23, 2005 22:49 UTC (Wed) by jonabbey (guest, #2736) [Link]

I thought that too.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 splashscreen competition winner announced

Posted Feb 23, 2005 23:28 UTC (Wed) by nedrichards (subscriber, #23295) [Link]

It also looks a hell of a lot better than the StarOffice 8 Beta splashscreen.