Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much? [LWN.net]

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 6:27 UTC (Tue) by pheldens (guest, #19366) [Link] (38 responses)

Nonsense 2003 type interface is what people want when not forced into others and cloud is for slaves.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:00 UTC (Tue) by MKesper (subscriber, #38539) [Link] (5 responses)

I'd suspect that was true once but not anymore.

At work I have to use MS Office 2010. Every time I use my private LO I wonder how old the interface feels.
As virtually all business users will have converted to ribbon interface by now, your only chance of migration will be offering something similar.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 4:18 UTC (Wed) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link] (4 responses)

Good for you. Figure out how to get that Ribbon to look the way YOU want yet?

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 7:55 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (3 responses)

He's not the exception. Ribbon interface works well for at least millions of MS Office users. IMO you're in a bubble.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 16:01 UTC (Thu) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (2 responses)

Perhaps, but on the other hand my experience that just brief show of Microsoft Office ribbon makes all previous users of Office (either OOo or MSO before 2005) asking me for some alternative. So far the Ribbon turned to me to be the best advertising for the LibreOffice.

Just saying.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 21, 2015 0:05 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

This isn't necessarily a useful piece of information regarding how well the interface works. There are always hold-outs whenever an interface changes, and the more radical the change the more of them there will be. That resistance speaks more to the immediate cost of learning the new interface than it does to its long-term value.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 21, 2015 9:43 UTC (Fri) by jonnor (guest, #76768) [Link]

And once people have invested and become accustomed to 'the new interface' (ribbon) then going back is a change which requires similar immediate costs.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:12 UTC (Tue) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (31 responses)

(This probably shouldn't be dignified with a response, but...) It's worth reading Microsoft's careful explanation of the Ribbon. Long story short, they actually talked to and extensively tested on users. They also had data from over a billion sessions from 2003. So they have a very good idea of what users do and don't "want when not forced". Part 7 is particularly relevant to this comment: "Our internal discussions [were] peppered with [...] wild guesses, justifications, and personal "anecdotes" served up as fact" just like... comments on a blog post. With this data, and user testing, they have a much better grasp of what users actually use, and how to show it to users, then they did in the '90s when, well, when the current LO UX was designed. (And it shows; as someone who used to have to use Word every day for work, 2010 is light-years ahead of 2003 and LO.)

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:30 UTC (Tue) by Felix.Braun (guest, #3032) [Link] (30 responses)

I agree that the ribbon interface is not as bad as it was made out to be, once you get used to it. I can get work done without the interface getting in my way. But that can be said of any interface that does not deliberately try to make things harder for their users. And yes, it feels cumbersome having to deal with different interfaces at home than what I am used to at the office. But is any of these interfaces objectively better? More discoverable? More intuitive?

I for one certainly don't feel that the ribbon interface is better. I know how to find the commands I regularly use. But the same is true of the "old" menu style interface copied by LibreOffice from Word2003. At the end of the day, I can get my work done in both. I still don't see the point of having been forced to learn the new interface. It's not really better for me, because I already knew how to use Word2003 efficiently. And judging by the documents I receive from less computer literate colleagues, they don't do significantly better in the new interface either.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:34 UTC (Tue) by MKesper (subscriber, #38539) [Link] (20 responses)

And judging by the documents I receive from less computer literate colleagues, they don't do significantly better in the new interface either.

But they are now used to it, having used it for years probably. Switching to LO will _feel_ old.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 9:33 UTC (Tue) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link]

I had to use MS Word recently for work reasons, and for me it's exactly the opposite: the ribbons felt clumsy, couldn't wait to get back to LO.

Rehdon

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 13:32 UTC (Tue) by kreijack (guest, #43513) [Link] (10 responses)

> But they are now used to it, having used it for years probably. Switching to LO will
> _feel_ old.

[Disclaimer: I am against the ribbon bar]

In this review http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2418419,00.asp the author put in the comment:

Cons: Clunky interface.

but without justifying it. This suggested me that creating the "Ribbon bar" Microsoft made all other software to appear as "old"; I think that this was an expected (and wanted) result by Microsoft.

Regarding the Ribbon bar there are several things that I hate
1)not all the icon have a text; with the old menu interface, you can help by phone another colleague. With the ribbon this is more difficult because you can't name an icon . And if I am searching a function which vaguely remember, a text helps more than an image.
2) the ribbon have an "automate adjustment" behavior. So if you resize the window the icons are moved e/o resized. This make more difficult to find it sometime.
3) the ribbon bar interface is big, leaving less space to the other function!
4) the ribbon bar interface is located on the top instead on the left/right (the monitor is wide, so why still use the top/bottom area ?)

Apart that, I fatigue to see any gain in the ribbon interface.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 14:01 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (9 responses)

I love how we still use a 3.5" floppy image for saving. Try explaining that icon to someone learning who has never seen one. Or the drum image for storage once spinning rust is relegated to storage centers only. Not that many have seen platters directly, but I imagine folks can at least imagine that something is spinning based on the sounds they make.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 17:28 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

My friend's child said: "Oh, it's a plastic save icon!" when she saw a 3.5" floppy on my wall.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 17:34 UTC (Tue) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link] (5 responses)

I love how we still use a 3.5" floppy image for saving.

So when did you last actually use scissors for cutting text? And then used, uh, a clip board?!? for pasting it somewhere else? Uh what? I think the floppy disk should be the least of your worries.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 18:24 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Well, "scissors" and "cut" are at least related. Copy…eh, I still see clipboards around (and I feel like many saw them in schools growing up, but that is probably becoming less common now). Paste icons differ around, but glue is also related.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 10:05 UTC (Wed) by nelljerram (subscriber, #12005) [Link] (3 responses)

I wonder what children make of that strange icon we still use to represent a phone: a kind of crescent with a larger lump at either end. The modern icon for a phone should be just a rectangle.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 1:17 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a TV series or documentary (don't remember which) where they give kids (about 5-12 years old) old chunks of technology they've never seen before. One of the ones I watched they gave the children an old ATT era phone with a rotary dial. Not a single kid had any idea what it was. When told what it was most couldn't figure out how to dial it because there were no buttons and better than half asked where you turned it on.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 1:31 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I know of "Kids React". Here are the tech ones I found:

1st iPod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvlbRQq1UM
VHS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kesMOzzNBiQ
Typewriters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfxRfkZdiAQ
Game Boy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pCp8g-VjOs
Rotary phones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkuirEweZvM
Old computers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF7EpEnglgk
Cassette players: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk_vV-JRZ6E

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 1:20 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

If a rectangle does mean smartphone, it would imply "the do everything device", not telephone anyways.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 22, 2015 4:18 UTC (Sat) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (1 responses)

have you paid attention to the typical symbol for a 'phone'....
it usually depict a shape of phone from the 70's.... a decade before the 3.5 floppy.
and yet somehow even kids today, who may have seen one in a museum or an old movie, still have no problem selecting the right 'icon' on their cell-phone to make a call.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 22, 2015 4:37 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Umm, they outlasted 3.5" floppies by quite a few years (landlines still exist you know…kids probably still see them in schools too). Hell, desk phones at jobs are still handsets. They're far from as obsolete as floppies. We've already moved onto machines which don't even have CD drives.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 19:43 UTC (Tue) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link] (7 responses)

different... not necessarily old

old, in this case, is a pejorative to denigrate a choice other than yours

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 4:30 UTC (Wed) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link] (6 responses)

Oh, you'd better believe it!

The word "old" is a dear friend to merchants and marketers.

I remember once reading about a marketing campaign by SCO encouraging people to give up on those "old Linux systems..." and go with their proprietary operating system. What was the name of that OS? Can't remember---it's too old.....

Companies like Microsoft love to talk about "Old."

Bach is "old." Beethoven is "old." Shakespeare is "old."

So what will people use 300 years from now when they want to get work done....the Ribbon or the menu system?

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 4:40 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

The command line!

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 16:11 UTC (Thu) by deucalion (guest, #12904) [Link]

I suppose when I mention EDLIN, few will rejoice and even less will say "nah, I'm still using debug to input data directly into memory."

:o)

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 4:45 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Ribbon, no doubt.

FutureUI

Posted Aug 19, 2015 12:22 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (2 responses)

So what will people use 300 years from now when they want to get work done....the Ribbon or the menu system?

Direct brain interface. And that is assuming computers as we know them even exist at that time...

FutureUI is already here

Posted Aug 19, 2015 14:16 UTC (Wed) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (1 responses)

Note that, already in 2015, "the menu system" as practiced by Office 2003/LibreOffice 2015 is mostly dead - phones, and a (much-needed) drive for simplicity in desktop software, have killed it in new software. Again, not to say that the Ribbon is The Solution, but clearly the giant wall of icons isn't the solution either. The sooner LO realizes that the better chance it has to get new adoption.

FutureUI is already here

Posted Aug 21, 2015 10:50 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

As noted already, the "Ribbon" is nothing truly new, and although I would agree that verbose menus are somewhat dated (remember the attempts to have "expanding" menus that just confused everyone?), there are plenty of places to look for other approaches.

When people bring up phones and tablets as the driving forces for change, I can't help wondering if I imagined my desktop computing experiences over twenty years ago when the average display had far fewer pixels than today's smartphones and where certain desktop environments made a lot more use of pop-up menus, not just as extra contextual menus but actually as their primary solution for menus. Maybe people regarding the removal of menubars and the adoption of alternatives as "novel" stuck to the Mac or Windows and, if they were even using the Internet many years ago, stuck to arguments about whether it was better to have a menubar at the top of the screen or inside every window.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:37 UTC (Tue) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (7 responses)

"But is any of these interfaces objectively better? More discoverable? More intuitive?"

Well, we can certainly objectively test discoverability, and I assume (since that was a stated goal of their design process) Microsoft's test data show exactly that. Again, it's worth reading the posts to understand what their goals were, and how they reached them. (Having watched people struggle on video with traditional toolbars, and having spoken to usability experts on the topic, I'd be shocked if MS's experiments show anything other than better discoverability.)

I'm not sure what "intuitive" means in this context, but if you mean "easy to understand for people who had access to desktop machines in the '90s'", then, sure, the LO-style toolbar is more intuitive. That's a rapidly diminishing market, though.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 11:35 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (6 responses)

I'm not sure what "intuitive" means in this context, but if you mean "easy to understand for people who had access to desktop machines in the '90s'", then, sure, the LO-style toolbar is more intuitive. That's a rapidly diminishing market, though.

Easy to understand for people who had access to desktop machines before the ribbon, perhaps. I personally strongly dislike this "forget about your VIC-20, grandpa, we'll have ten people to replace you shortly" attitude that has become even more popular in the age of outsourcing and "swipe to know what to swipe" user interfaces.

And no, it's not about not liking new stuff. In fact, when I once made the regrettable choice of using Microsoft Word for something important (and regretted not using LaTeX of all things afterwards), the misery was compounded by the fact that I had already been using a more coherent and advanced document-processing solution for years (Impression Publisher, for anyone who may have heard of it) that had things like document stylesheets years before Microsoft's feeble implementation (that few people use anyway because it's easier to hit the different font effect buttons).

Sometimes the old stuff is actually better because it was properly thought-through (not referring to Word in any incarnation here, though) instead of being some furniture-rearranging exercise to achieve some kind of "fresh look" for a decaying property.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 12:31 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

> > I'm not sure what "intuitive" means in this context, but if you mean "easy to understand for people who had access to desktop machines in the '90s'", then, sure, the LO-style toolbar is more intuitive. That's a rapidly diminishing market, though.

> Easy to understand for people who had access to desktop machines before the ribbon, perhaps. I personally strongly dislike this "forget about your VIC-20, grandpa, we'll have ten people to replace you shortly" attitude that has become even more popular in the age of outsourcing and "swipe to know what to swipe" user interfaces.

And going back to that era, I had access to two word processors, one of which I loved (WordMARC Composer, otherwise known as Pr1meWord). When WordPerfect came on the scene, I rapidly dropped the other two *from* *choice*. And if you're talking about a UI, it didn't really have one - it gave you a "blank sheet of paper" and let you get on with it!

It also had this wonderful feature that *let you specify* where you wanted things on the page! So you could do things properly, lay out the document in your head or on scrap paper, then *get it right* in the word processor. I don't know whether Word has improved or not, but it always used to lay things out how *it* thought best, usually moving all your graphics on to the wrong page, and things like that! (Writer, unfortunately, feels too much like a Word clone to me, so I don't like that either). Sadly, all of Windows, Linux, and hardware has moved on and my ancient copies of WordPerfect no longer run. I can't afford to shell out for a new copy, and ever since Corel rewrote it as a Windows program (v9), it's been a lot naffer anyway. I need to try and get Dosbox, Win3.11, and WP6.1 working and then I'll be happy as larry again :-)

The trouble with so many programs is they are designed FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THEIR JOB. That's why WordPerfect was great - it was designed for *trained* *typists*, and they were very productive. That's why Word was such rubbish (and partly why it won out) - it was designed for people *who* *didn't* *know* *how* *to* *type* - so it appealed to managers who thought it was wonderful and foisted it on everyone else. And which is why the people who CAN type, HATE it.

Cheers,
Wol

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 15:32 UTC (Tue) by markhb (guest, #1003) [Link]

WordPerfect's UI was the infamous template that fit above the F-keys and told you what Fx, Shift-Fx, Alt-Fx and Ctrl-Fx did. But it's still alive today, so not bad for a program that had its beginnings on Data General's AOS/VS.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 6:16 UTC (Thu) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (3 responses)

It's possible to get WP8 to run on modern Linux. I have it running on Slackware64-current. I don't use it; I just have it as a curiosity. But it does run.

It's not particularly easy to get working. You have to install a battery of ancient 32-bit glibc libraries and disable ASLR. But it's definitely possible, and, if you really love WordPerfect that much, it's probably worth the one-time futzing necessary to make it work.

And yes, WP6.1 in Win31 in DOSBox also works -- or maybe it was DOSEMU, can't say for sure. I've dealt with WordPerfect as the single biggest problem in a non-techie's switch to Linux, so I know all the various ways to get that piece of crap (sorry, still annoyed years later) running. The user rejected the native Linux version (too different from Windows version), modern WP running under WINE (occasional glitches), and WP6.1 in Win31 in some DOS emulator (too different from MODERN Windows version).

After years of WINE glitches, the ultimate solution was modern WP in not-modern Windows in VirtualBox. Not a single complaint since. You may find happiness with WinXP in VirtualBox running WP X9 or whatever they're up to now as well. Try everything, man; use what you love.

I personally stopped using word processors for anything after discovering LaTeX. But to each his own.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 21, 2015 9:23 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

:-)

WP fanatics probably should switch to Latex :-) I'll stop evangelising WP when you pry Reveal Codes from my cold dead hands (or you implement it, PROPERLY, in some other word processor!)

The problem is no other Word Processor I know has this window where you can edit AS TEXT, and see the gui changes appear. When I use WP, I work in Reveal Codes all the time (yet my wife hates it, and not surprisingly is quite happy in Word - because I can't see what (or more importantly, why) Word is doing what it does, I hate that).

And as I said, WordPerfect just lets me place anything I want, exactly where I want. If I want something *exactly* 1cm from the top and left margins, I can tell WP to put it there! It'll sort everything else around that, rather than sorting that around everything else! (As Word seems to do all the time :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 23, 2015 4:29 UTC (Sun) by gomadtroll (guest, #11239) [Link] (1 responses)

Whoopi, WP8 :-) My use of WP8 is a Virtualbox instance of NT4 and WP8 OfficePro, 96mb of memory (not bad for an OS + Office Suite), it is just another application running on my workstation, not bad for an OS + Office s.

AOO vs LO, I really don't get most discussions..mostly poltical, not real workflow comparisons.

I use AOO because of its better document fidelity with my archived data, something LO did not give the same priority. That was my decision, LO does lots of other things well, none that would compel me to use LO over AOO.

I have both installed, the shining new LO5 just in case someone is brain dead enough to send me a ooxml doc instead of "exporting/publish to/pdf..

greg

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 23, 2015 10:33 UTC (Sun) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

I don't this reply to sound like the typical "file bugs please" response that I'm sure you've seen before, but I do wonder if you had raised any of the backwards-compatibility issues you discovered with the LO developers. But I understand doing so can be really time consuming--particularly when your only reproduction case is in a document you might not want to send to the developers.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 15:38 UTC (Tue) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

Basically, the ribbon interface was not designed for you---and not for me either.

There are three kinds of users: clueless, power users, _really_ advanced users. Clueless users love the ribbon because they don't know the keyboard shortcuts and they used to get lost in the menu and toolbar maze; now they have a combined menu and toolbar interface, captions below toolbar button or button groups, and more commonly-used functionality available within roughly the same screen real estate.

You and I are power users: we know the most common keyboard shortcuts, we know what functionality is there and we can find it in the menus.

Really advanced users don't really write documents, they prepare templates for others to use. They know _all_ the keyboard shortcuts and invent more with macros, automate the hell out of their documents with fields and styles and macros; stuff that power users think they know but actually can only scratch the surface of. They don't care much about the ribbon because they don't use menus as much as power users do.

So, if we were to use MS Office, we'd be screwed. Now if only LO Impress didn't break multiple-object selection (4.4.5.2, no I didn't open a bug because I'm going to upgrade to Fedora 23 and 5.0.0 next week anyway)...

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:14 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

I just want to do word processing and presentations with it, and use it for all of my published papers and my many presentations. Google docs just doesn't work for anything that far from what you would do with MS Notepad. Nothing has made me want to have a ribbon.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:20 UTC (Tue) by vasvir (subscriber, #92389) [Link] (19 responses)

Don' think that the difference between GoogleDocs and LO lies in the simplicity of the interface. In my opinion there are 2 killer features that GoogleDocs has over the competition.

1) It runs in the browser
2) It enables cooperative multi-editing

These coupled with a free cloud based storage (GDrive) makes it a very compelling offer (in return for your data of course).

None of these two features are easily addressable from LO. There are some efforts that are trying to build the technology stack but they are probably not very near yet.

* http://www.webodf.org/
* https://ethercalc.net/ - Spreadsheet with synchronous collaborative edits
* https://github.com/owncloud/documents

Maybe if they build the collaboration support as a (REST?) service backend (like skype or firefox helo) that negotiates the connection and leaves the clients into P2P mode to edit the document collaboratively would be something that LO could take advantage of.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:59 UTC (Tue) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link] (7 responses)

2) It enables cooperative multi-editing

Cooperative multi-editing was made possible with Sugar interface version of Abiword first developed for the XO laptop.It will be hardly surprised that is where Google Docs got some inspirations. Let remembers LibreOffice is much more complex than GoogleDocs, is currently in a process of cleaning remaining old codes and has features not found on GoogleDocs from Drawing to Formula and support of Open Document Format.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 8:47 UTC (Tue) by vasvir (subscriber, #92389) [Link] (2 responses)

Good to know that. I didn't know that this lineage goes back to Sugar and XO.

Yes I know LO does a terrific job in the existing codebase and I personally enjoy a lot the blog posts of Michael Meeks.

I just feel that collaborative editing is such a killer feature that may move people over and make people ignore import, transition and formatting issues.

I mean not having to sync edits by e-mail is a major win and something I could talk my company doing it given that the data stays with us and they don't go to GDrive,

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 12:36 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

The internal (inherited) layout of Writer is rubbish. I know :-(

I've been digging at the project to implement something like "reveal codes", as a feature "to kill WordPerfect" - THAT is the feature WP fanatics like me refuse to surrender ... You'd think, with documents now in XML that would be dead simple, as there's a fairly close mapping between reveal-codes and XML. But because of Writer's internal layout, it's an almost total rewrite to get it to work :-(

That said, I believe a lot of the cleanup work going on is going to make this a lot easier :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 1:00 UTC (Wed) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]

I just found out LibreOffice Calc allows sharing document under Tools->Share Documents menu. It appears codes for collaboration mode are already in place but are under low priority for Writer.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 14:18 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

I think that was in the general version of Abiword - it wasn't specific to sugar/XO?

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 17:23 UTC (Tue) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link] (2 responses)

It is for Sugar version. I haven't seen that functionality in general version of Abiword in any general desktop environment other than a browser. In Sugar interface, it was straightfoward, get into network and choose your file you want share to either public or in group. You can try it out with Sugar on stick available on Sugarlabs.org.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 19:27 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

Hmm, I'm sure I played with it years ago. It's definitely there in Abiword 3.0.1 - "Collaborate" menu. And LWN mentioned it in its article on the 2.8.0 release in '09: http://lwn.net/Articles/360269/

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 0:54 UTC (Wed) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]

I just installed Abiword for try it out. From the collaborate menu, I noticed there is Sugar Presence Service as well, a sign of involvement to the Abiword development. Thanks paulj, I will take a look again at the Sugar Interface and Gnome Classic session included in the XO laptop (all versions). It is a shame that function weren't ported to LibreOffice Writer.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 10:26 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

Isn't owncloud documents just webodf? Or at least, it started like that.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 12:10 UTC (Tue) by oever (guest, #987) [Link]

Yes, ownCloud uses WebODF to do the collaborative editing. Other projects can also use it offer the same functionality in their web portal.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 11:19 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (6 responses)

1) It runs in the browser [...]

The problems with Google Docs become apparent when you have a slow or unreliable network connection. May not matter for some use cases, but is a killer problem in many common ones, like writing on a laptop while travelling.

In my opinion, is is not really a competitor to classic office suites.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 18:11 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (5 responses)

Are you sure you've actually enabled offline editing? Yes, there are some glitches, but Google Docs DO work offline!

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 18:28 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I love when I get disconnected and it tells me to enable it next time…without telling me where or how (or it seems to hide when I get back online, I don't know). Not going to bother watching the video because I really dislike working in the thing anyways; rather just copy the text into vim and put it back later since it tends to break in a Vim-binding'd browser anyways. Yeah, I know the Google Docs team probably doesn't care about my use case(s).

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 4:50 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (3 responses)

Are you sure you've actually enabled offline editing?

No. Actually have not used Google docs for some time, precisely because of the network issue I mentioned. Besides, according to the page you linked to, the offline feature works only with the Chrome browser, which I don't use. This requirement gives it an unpleasant whiff of lock-in.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 6:01 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

The question was whether Google Docs is a competitor to LibreOffice and MSOffice. People don't really care about vendor lock-in or else MSOffice would not have been a contendor.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 12:18 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

Many users (in addition F/OSS enthusiasts) are in fact beginning to care about lock-in, as witness the various initiatives around the world to require open document formats in public administration. I think it is a result of electronic documentation becoming mature. When the final archived version is no longer paper (which is universally readable by anyone with working eyes), the file format starts to matter a great deal.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 13:57 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Some of those initiatives didn't withstand the kind of small-minded, short-termism that pandered to Microsoft's OOXML standards-buying and lobbying, however. When public institutions with relatively generous budgets cannot be bothered to look beyond clicking "save" (ribbon or otherwise) in Microsoft Whatever, one can only imagine the kind of poverty they plead for their behaviour when budgets are actually reduced.

All these people now look to "the cloud" to solve all their document management problems, meaning that they now have another problem to deal with. Especially when Office 365 becomes Office 360, as has been known to happen. In short, there are lots of stupid/ignorant people who actually think lock-in is good, hard as it is for us to believe.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 12:14 UTC (Tue) by oever (guest, #987) [Link]

A working group at OASIS has been working for a while on standardizing change tracking in a fine-grained way that is compatible with the OpenDocument Format and could work between different implementations. The brunt of this work is to come up with a full set of operations that can be applied to an ODF document. WebODF and OX documents have such sets but they are not yet complete and independent of the standardization effort. This independence is a result of available time that the respective developers have to move this forward. So currently progress is on the application level, not yet on the standards level.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 13:19 UTC (Tue) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]

I do daily work in LO git master. There's a pile of much nicer Google Drive interface work in progress, courtesy a GSOC student, Szymon Klos. It still has bugs (you can't create a new document and save it to GDrive, and when you go to the file open dialogue it shows files without extensions as 0 bytes), but for editing existing files it basically Just Works!

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 10:37 UTC (Tue) by keeperofdakeys (guest, #82635) [Link] (2 responses)

Keeping in mind that the last Microsoft Word I used with the ribbon interface was 2007 (it doesn't look like it's changed much), have they solved one of the biggest problems with the ribbon interface - far too many 'advanced' features being hidden as a giant list of icons you need to add to the quick access bar. I can only imagine how many users didn't know where their features went. Menubars may become big and complex, but at least they are able to show all the features available.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 14:03 UTC (Wed) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

>Keeping in mind that the last Microsoft Word I used with the ribbon interface was 2007 (it doesn't look like it's changed much)

(To a person that doesn't use them, a bash prompt and a DOS prompt are indistinguishable.)

Almost everything about it has changed, in some cases in major ways.

The similarity between Word 2007's UI and Word 2010+'s UI is comparable to the similarity between Vi and Vim (or sh 1.0 vs bash 4.3): conceptually it uses most of the same ideas, so at a quick glance it might look like it's almost the same program, but in fact pretty much every aspect has been improved.

I'm not certain that I've ever come across a feature I've used even once that was missing from the ribbon in Word or Excel (I have in Outlook, in one case, but then Outlook was spawned in the pits of hell so it seems unfair to use it as an example), but you can always add your own tabs, or add your own groups into existing tabs, if necessary. When doing this, you can look at a categorised list or available functions, where some of the "categories" are actually pseudo-categories like "commands not in the ribbon". You can also define your keyboard shortcuts here, in case you have a burning desire to map "Paste as Source Formatting" to "ctrl+shift+p", or whatever.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 15:40 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

The fact that this is completely customizable makes many of the complaints that the defaults don't perfectly correspond to someones unique and personal tastes look somewhat silly, like someone going out of their way to be contrary by refusing to use the tools built for them to fix their problems. It's amazing how many people who work with and write software for computers every day think that programs written by other people are supposed to be psychic and conform to their every whim without configuration or understanding.

With the MS Ribbon, they documented a long research and testing process which brought them to that design, it's hard to take criticism seriously from people who don't have the foggiest idea of how the design was made. I don't even care about MS Office, I just dislike poorly thought out criticism.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 11:50 UTC (Tue) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link] (4 responses)

Please, people, go back to your open-source roots here.

I hate the new ribbon. But I will defend to the death a user's right to choose them.
I hate Metro. But I will defend to the death a user's right to choose it.

As such, I deploy as much as possible where there are OPTIONS. This is where MS kills itself and loses users. Provide the OPTION to have an old classic start menu, or a "Modern" desktop (e.g. via Classic Shell) and everyone is happy. Go one of the other and you automatically annoy 50% of people.

I am a heavy LO user but I have absolutely NO objection to a ribbon interface. So long as it's optional. It can be turned off. And everything works on both interfaces.

You're talking about forcing people to work in your preferred manner. DO NOT. Talk instead about how to carry two huge UI paradigms simultaneously in order to active internal functions that are IDENTICAL no matter the button that was clicked to do them.

This kind of thing annoys me so much in "human interface" design. Do you want X or Y? Neither. And both. And an option to do what I like. It's really not that huge a burden to maintain an optional ribbon interface for those who switch the option on. Hell, make it the default. Just give me a way to go back to how it looks currently, i.e. no ribbon, without loss of functionality.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 12:42 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

A O ****ing L !!!

+100

Why oh why do they have to keep on changing things! "OOOhhh SHINY!!!" (and usually it's re-inventing the wheel, POORLY, at that!!!)

When you hit 50+ people have difficulty learning new things. It's not that we don't want to, but unfortunately many illnesses like Alzheimers, Parkinsons, just plain old ageing, and all that stuff are beginning to make themselves felt, and they all interfere, to some extent, with the learning process. I'm lucky, I'm young for my age, but far too many of my contemporaries are beginning to have noticeable problems.

Cheers,
Wol

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 15:55 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

Options just make things even harder to find and more confusing to people using it. It leads to sudden different behaviour changes.

Anyway, just speaking as someone who uses MS Excel a lot, has loads of colleagues using MS Excel. Discoverability of options using the ribbon is way better than menus. It's still not perfect, but it gets better with MS Excel version. Calc is pretty annoying to use, MS Excel is way more helpful. With MS Excel it seems like Microsoft watched people who use MS Excel for way too much time per day, then tried to assist the users in making things easier. Calc is pretty far off in this (various small things).

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 22:51 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (1 responses)

> It's really not that huge a burden to maintain an optional ribbon interface for those who switch the option on.
Actually it is, it's a huge chunk of code that needs to be developed and maintained, leaving the developers with less time to implement other, potentially more useful features. Also, good software is created by keeping your focus, and not by trying to be all things to all people.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 25, 2015 11:10 UTC (Tue) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

Amen, amen, amen. A plugin structure might help - if those who want the old ui are willing to put in the work, of course.

But one good ui always beats two or three crappy ones.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 13:16 UTC (Tue) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]

To be fair, this is quite a lot of why LibreOfficeKit - the Android project, for example, is an exercise in putting a completely new interface on LO.

So if there's someone who wants ribbons that much, it's now in the realms of the feasible, if not easy :-)

I'd say the main competition point with Google Docs is (a) live collaborative editing (this is IME a killer app for Google Docs, it's one we use at work a whole lot) (b) convenience (it's always RIGHT THERE in your browser). LO Online has potential for this, and unlike GDocs it'll be able to convert a random OOXML document with any fidelity whatsoever. (Seriously, GDocs is utterly incompetent at docx, but you never see people complain about this.)

Is ribbon patented by Microsoft?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 16:46 UTC (Tue) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896) [Link] (1 responses)

I think the ribbon user interface was patented by Microsoft, and while they would sometimes license it, they were hostile to the idea of another office suite using it. I'm not sure if that's true, but that's what I recall. Yes, this is like patenting the idea of a car steering wheel.

Thanks to recent Supreme Court rulings that patent may no longer be enforceable, or Microsoft may be willing to license it. But it'd be wise to check out legal issues before adding a ribbon.

Frankly, I'm happy that LO does not have a ribbon, but I'd keep using LO even if it had a ribbon.

Yet another example of why patents are a bad idea.

Is ribbon patented by Microsoft?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 6:41 UTC (Wed) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link]

Yeah, the patents are a potential issue, which is part of why I carefully didn't say "just implement Microsoft's Ribbon". The point was supposed to be less "implement this specific UX" and more "LO's UX is actually demonstrably very bad for many users, please fix it".

To be clear, I'm fairly sympathetic to Michael and team here: good UX work is very hard; harder still without the data that Microsoft and others now take for granted. But that's really got to be the focus, not quibbling with Apache.

Re: use ribbon or something ribbon-like to make complexity easier to deal with

Posted Aug 19, 2015 2:31 UTC (Wed) by ldo (guest, #40946) [Link]

The trouble with the Microsoft Office Ribbon is that its design comes from a time before modern wide-screen monitors became popular.

These monitors have a lot more available space horizontally than vertically. Yet the Ribbon takes up precious vertical space.

Compare the Sidebar in LibreOffice, which is positioned beside the document, instead of above or below it: it gives room for the view of the document to take up more of the height of the screen, corresponding more naturally to the portrait orientation of normal printed pages. Which evolved over centuries to maximize readability, after all.

So no, we don’t want to copy the Ribbon in a modern UI.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 4:16 UTC (Wed) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link] (1 responses)

Sorry, but I found the Ribbon interface horrid. Besides, there are people who have used Windows since the 1990's who won't give up Word 2003 simply *because* of that.

The ribbon interface was supposed to reduce complexity, but, as I have said before, it doesn't do squat if people can't SEE IT AGAINST THE BACKGROUND.

For starters.

HINT: When I have to be on Windows, I still use the command line for a lot of things. That PATH environment variable is awfully useful if you want to get things done fast.

For starters.

If LO needs to abandon the menus for something else, let's hope it has more inclusiveness than the

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 14:28 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

Ribbon is easy to use on 1280x1024. Monitors that size are really cheap and very common place. Eventually you'll buy a new monitor. Currently 1900x1080 is available for a great price. Anything lower than around 1000 vertical and it gets cumbersome if the ribbon is open all the time. However, you can easily make it work like a menu bar. It's not perfect with a low resolution laptop screen, but in those cases it is not just the screen; you also have to deal with a crappy keyboard and mouse.

If your big issues aren't a big issue at all, then maybe visit some companies / heavy MS Excel users sometimes. It took me quite some time to get used to the ribbon interface (habit). But it was just habit. Ribbon mostly tries to show me stuff that is useful. IMO it way better makes use of screen space.

"Hidden" functionality like "remove duplicates" now actually is discovered by a few. "AutoFilter" and sorting is used way more often by people noticing it themselves. Unlike before...