Re: [Usability] GEdit, Leafpad and Office Suites

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Tue, 24 Jan 2006, Calum Benson wrote:

> Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 12:48:03 +0000
> From: Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>
> To: usability gnome org
> Cc: weibchen cosmopod com, Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>
> Subject: Re: [Usability] GEdit, Leafpad and Office Suites
>
> On Sat, 2006-01-21 at 21:14 +0000, Alan Horkan wrote:
> > On Tue, 17 Jan 2006 weibchen cosmopod com wrote:
>
> > > I definitely think that Calum's people
> >
> > "Calum's people"  :)
>
> :)  I rather doubt it would make a good John Le Carré novel...

I was thinking like "Pan's People" you know with dancing.

> > > should investigate and research this office suite further as there are
> > > lessons regarding the user interface that could be applied to Star
> > > Office/OpenOffice.org
> >
> > Even though he works for Sun Microsystems I believe Calum is not directly
> > involved in OpenOffice.org developement.
>
> True, I'm not... I can certainly pass along suggestions to Matthias and
> the rest of our Star/OpenOffice UI team in Hamburg, though.

Now that StarOffice has done the necessary Microsoft Office cloning needed
to gain market share hopefully they will now have the chance to explore
new ideas too.  Although it made StarOffice a little bit harder to learn
teh emphasise on paroperly using styles for layout always seemed like a
good idea in the long run.  Similarly the Lotus interface seems like it
would be powerful once you had learnt what you were doing.  I think though
Microsoft has shown the benefits of making things as easy as possible for
beginners, casual infrequent users, having a shallow learning curve to
hook in users (and sneakier tactics to lock them in and keep them).

As for fast light text editors you might also want to take a look at
inittab which is the text editor included with GPE (Gnome Palmtop
Enviroment (wish they had a catchier non-acronym name).  With the help of
Garnome I've compiled other GPE applications and used them on the standard
Gnome desktop.  It is really nice to have the option to use fast, light,
focussed applications and I hope we will see more.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org
Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/