Making office apps parallel.

[Adrian Custer <acuster nature berkeley edu>]

Congratulations all around.

Abiword is at 1.0, gnumeric pre1.2 is looking better and better and now
the two are linking up!

If you open up both apps (gnumeric 1.1.x and abiword 1.x) there is a
huge amount of parallelism in their "looks" and I wonder if it would be
worth standardizing the little pieces that aren't the same. The menus
are incredibly similar:

File,Edit,View,Insert,Format,Tools	are the same
"data" vs. "window web"			are different
help					is the same.

In the menus and toolbars there start being greater inconsistencies.
Some of these are necessary since these are not the same app, but others
could easily be negotiated/standardized which would increase the
coherency of the two apps. The file menu for instance, gnumeric has
import, abiword only has open. The preferences dialog sits in the file
menu in gnumeric, under the tools menu of abiword. The toolbars could
similarly be standardized (help or no). 

Obviously some of these are important to those who made the decisions
and there is a good reason to keep them different. But where these
differences are not critical, parallelism will make users feel like
these two apps belong together.


cheers and thanks,
adrian