Question: What's happening in Project Renaissance at the moment?
Answer: The team answers frequently asked questions!
After our first prototyping phase, a lot of questions have been raised concerning the goals of Project Renaissance and its current state. After spending an incredible amount of time to address these comments individually, we now know about the commonly asked questions on mailing lists, in personal mails or in blog comments.
These questions have been collected and discussed with all the people involved in Project Renaissance, so you may consider these answers to be somehow official. You can find them on our fully revised FAQ page (link below).
But, plain text is missing a personal touch... So I'm very happy to announce that the FAQ page also features a video with Florian Effenberger (OpenOffice.org Marketing Co-Lead) who interviews Andreas Bartel (Project Renaissance). Enjoy it!
So check out the Project Renaissance Frequently Asked Questions in the OpenOffice.org Wiki!
And please: If somebody has answers with regard to Project Renaissance, please guide him to our FAQ page or just drop a message at the ux-ui mailing list (ui@ux.openoffice.org)! Thanks!
And now? The next few days we will publish more information about the current state of User Feedback data. Stay tuned ... and have a nice day!
Christoph
3 comments:
this comes from Renaissance FAQ:
"Question: Why don't you just copy the Ribbon interface of Microsoft
Office 2007?
Answer: OpenOffice.org has millions of users all over the world, and for
Project Renaissance we have defined the goal to serve them in the best
way possible. However, the convenience of the Ribbon UI is still subject
to heated discussions among Microsoft Office users and its acceptance
among OpenOffice.org users is very low. Therefore, aside from any
licensing issues, it is very unlikely that the Microsoft Ribbon UI would
be the appropriate solution for OpenOffice.org users."
I'm happy they finally admitted that acceptance of Ribbon GUI is low among OOo users...
that's why the petition against Renaissance project collected 540 signatures. ( http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/stoprenaissance/ )
however I still don't fully understand that FAQ answer...
when they say that " it is very unlikely that the Microsoft Ribbon UI would
be the appropriate solution for OpenOffice.org users"
what does this mean:
1- are they still denying the too many similarities between Renaissance GUI and Ribbon?
2- did they finally decide to give up with OOo GUI Ribbonization, and radically change the GUI they proposed with previous Renaissance prototypes?
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"
To recap for those unfamiliar with these posts (now closed): Although Project Renaissance has publicly clarified it's intent to improve the OOo user interface through functionally enhanced behaviors, several blog commenters - who are generally more knowledgeable than common OOo users - have repeatedly applied The Duck Test to an underwhelmingly meager prototype and are now absolutely certain that a conspiracy exists to reconstitute OOo with the dreaded ribbons of MSO 2007! In a shrewd tactical move, The Wizard of Oz and Tommy, who both tend to post too much (unlike Christoph and me, who just tend to write too much), have started an online petition to counter the mad, thoughtless actions of-- are you still reading this???
My two cents, with regard to issues currently in discussion:
The on-screen implementation examples linked by Boschetti Filippo (09-08-15) and Gianluca Turconi (09-08-31) have merit...
The opposition link provided by Someone (09-08-15) actually has some potentially valuable implementation insight under the subheading "Why Does the Ribbon Hurt Productivity?"...
For those disdainful of changing the OOo GUI, why not simply designate the current iteration just for them? The practice is already established in the industry; in fact, even Microsoft, with Vista on the verge of replacement, still continues to support XP, providing it as "new" with some netbooks...
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