Re: What is GNOME office?

[Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc cu-portland edu>]

> On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Kevin D. Knerr, Sr. wrote:
> 
> > And that is the real trick--to deliver a technically excellent product
> > that end-user *can* and will *want* to use . . .
> > 
> > Which begs the age-old question: do we mimic the UI of MS apps because
> > that's what most end-users are accustomed to, or do we try to go at
> > least one step better, but risk "confusing" these folks.
> 
> The approach we've tried to take in Abiword is to make each feature we
> implement as least as good as good as MS Word. If we're unsure how to
> present a UI feature to the user and there is no clear better way to do
> it we copy MS Word.


I wish more people doing software could have this open of a mind,
unfortunately, some pieces of software are simply copying the MS
Human/Computer Interface, rather than figuring out which things can be
done better.  Out of curiosity, have you tried to take advantage of the
HCI labs that Eazel has?  I don't have a lot of information about the
labs, but I'd really hope that they're available to the entire GNOME
community, rather than just for Eazel.

> Where we think we have a better way of presenting a feature to the user
> we'll do it.
> 
> My favourite example of this in our Word Count feature which you can park
> to the side of your document and watch your word count advance to the 1000
> words you need for your term paper.


Can you set a sound event to play when you reach X number of words, so
that you know when to quit?

    Greg