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Posts in 2008 December 05
OpenOffice On The Right Track For A Redesign
While OpenOffice 3.0 improved the situation a little, OpenOffice still looks quite outdated, especially when you compare it to Microsoft’s Office 2007. There are a lot of ways to go about fixing this problem. Luckily for us, OpenOffice has chosen an excellent path.
The first step is, of course, deciding to do something about the old look. This has been done, thanks to the Renaissance project. Then, you have to come up with the new design. This is the really challenging part. We will not see the results for some time (although I am sure we will see lots of ideas and drafts), but the currently outlined plan for the redesign looks great.
The first step in the current plan is to get people to fill out this survey. The survey basically just asks about how you use OpenOffice and what features are most important. Still, these are important things to know. I am very hopeful that this survey will provide enough information to at least know where to focus the redesign. After all, why redesign a feature that no one uses?
Next, the Renaissance project will ask people to use an extension that records information about their activities. It is not yet clear exactly what this will be, but the idea should be along the same line as the one before it: gather information about how many people use what features.
It will be some time before we can see the final product, but project Renaissance is already looking very promising from the beginning.
A few days ago I asked for your dreams for Linux in 2009. At the time I promised to invite you to share your ideas for implementing some of the dreams shared on the original post. I have already received a fantastic response to the original post, so I decided to go ahead and offer the first sub-dream opportunity.
Petros Koutoupis suggested this as part of his dream in response to the original post:
“As a good example, the foundation of the Microsoft Windows platform rests on three unstable pillars. If one were to fall, the rest will follow. These pillars are: (1) Education, (2) Productivity and (3) Multimedia related. The easiest and more influential to go after initially would be education. Not only would it be cheaper for a school to deploy and run the Linux Operating System but the students come out with familiarity in the platform. By the time they go into their respective careers, the seed would have been planted. It also would not stop a student from purchasing a Linux-based PC for their home computing seeing how they would be familiar with it at school.”
The question for you today, then, is how would you like to see Linux expand further in to education?
Just leave your idea for how Linux could succeed in education in a comment below.