Budapest, Day 2 and 3

I already proposed two days ago, that - if you like - we may have a look at Budapest together. Yesterday, I wasn't able to publish anything, so let's continue with a small photo series taken during the last two days.

What we found out: Budapest is absolutely amazing ;-) You may look at any house, any street light or any handrail - you will find tiny but interesting details. So if you are here, too - pay attention!

Something we didn't manage to see on Saturday was the Dohány Street Synagogue. So we went back on Sunday - here is a small picture showing some of the "leafs" of the memorial in the garden.

Where to go now? We decided to go to Buda Castle to enjoy some of the sights having a greatly improved weather situation. To avoid walking all the time (and we walked a lot ...), we used the famous Budavári Sikló (a hill funicular). Look down, but only this time :-)

Once we arrived at the top, we had to return to the Matthias Church (same game like the Synagogue) to get inside ... or better: insight. Although it has been said that both the interior and the exterior are astonishing, I slightly prefer the look of the latter one. But see for yourself ...

Once we finished that, we spent our evening with some community members. Delicious! The meals, of course.

Today, we started our tour with André and we decided to visit something that (most probably) won't be part of the usual tourist tours: the Szemlő-hegyi-barlang (flowstone cave). Maybe some pictures help to describe how amazing some parts look ...

Hint: the small lower part is the hiking route ...

Hint: his picture shows a ladder towards to top of the cave ...

Okay, let's finish this small excursion - most probably I'll be able to tell a bit more after our OOoCon Budapest City Tour that will take place tomorrow.

Good night!

Christoph

Budapest, Day 1

Hi everyone!

Well, a few weeks passed by without providing any life signal. Sorry! To summarize it: many things happened that required to focus on the "real life".

Now I am already in Budapest and I'm looking forward for the OpenOffice.org Conference, especially to meet all the community members (again). Until that finally happens, there will be a few days for vacation ... if you want to join, here is a picture taken from the Géllert Hill.

See you!

Christoph

Time Machine Reloaded - November 8th

Hi folks!

It's the right time to set the time right ... This is the last day of my little Time-Machine-Blog which still covers the adventure OpenOffice.org Conference 2009.

November 8th

It seems that the today's weather wants to ease our goodbye - in the morning it rained and the sun (lowercase letters!) was nearly gone. There were still a few hours until my flight to Germany, so we decided to store my luggage at the main station and to see as much as we can.

Yesterday I talked about the time constraints and that we were not able to get into the Colosseum. Today, we joined a tourist group which dramatically reduces waiting time and provides some more historical facts. But here, the only thing that really matters is a picture...

Above, you see the inside of the Colosseum. Or let's say the remaining parts, since we already look at the basement. Many of the precious goods have already be taken away, for example the marble decorations. We have been told, that the walls have been completely covered ... and now we also know that the holes in the walls have been used to attach the marble tiles.

Although sometimes it might feel different, I think that theming the UI of OpenOffice.org is far more easy than to cover a zillion square meters with extremely heavy material :-)

Okay, we didn't only stare at holes ... we also moved on to get into the Roman Forum. To give you an idea that I had to hurry up, I will only provide one picture (Do I hear any relief for saving you some time? *g*). Funnily, the place had been a private "theater" for the emperor. Nice idea ...

That said, I had to hurry up to get to the airport. After saying goodbye to André, I went towards the main station. Due to my time buffer, I had the chance to enjoy my very last cappuccino. Sigh.

The rest went rather well and so everyone - and everything - landed safely. I mean, also my bag arrived without any further deformation :-)

Different to me. The last thing I thought was "bed, sleep, bed". Well, I had some nice dreams ...

Now

I hope you enjoyed the last days. If you have any comments, proposals or just critique, then please let me know! To me, it was a great pleasure, because i had the chance to experience some tiny details again. Details which have been covered by the whole buzz around the OpenOffice.org Conference.

Literally, see you next year! :-)

Christoph

PS: It may bother you, but for Planet readers it might be worth to have a look at the original blog posting which better preserves formatting

Time Machine Reloaded - November 7th

Hi again,

the OpenOffice.org Conference is already, but when going 7 days back in time, we are still in Italy.

November 7th

Originally, some of us planned to reside some days longer in Orvieto and to eventually visit Rome by train. Some things changed after the announcement that there will be a strike by the railway employees. Jacqueline and André managed to get some rooms in Rome and to discuss the issue with our hotel. Fortunately, the hotel personnel was extremely kind and agreed to change our reservation. Thanks!!!

We moved on to Rome - and to my surprise - the neighborhood was extremely nice. As you will see on the picture, we saw a building with an orange tree (for everyone living in warmer regions, that is something special for us).


After dropping our baggage, we instantly moved towards the center of the city to visit some sights. Here is the well known Colosseum. I provide a picture without tourists - the amount of people there is a bit annoying ;-)

Besides the Colosseum, the whole site offers a lot to see. Due to the limited time - we wanted to continue our sightseeing tour by bus - we just had a brief look at the Roman Forum. Funnily, we've met Andreas who helped us to get some "inside" pictures. Mmh, the gate on the picture lets it look like a prison ...

As I already said, we continued the tour by bus and got of at special places. One example is the "St. Peter's Square" in the Vatican City.

As you can see, it is rather large. But that doesn't guarantee that you will only meet strangers - it seems that the OpenOffice.org people are just everywhere :-) That time, we met Rene who joined us...

Once inside, we decided to take the over 500 steps to enjoy the great view from the dome of the St. Peter's Basilica. Have a look at the shadow in the center of the picture - no, that's not my head ;-)

 

The building is absolutely impressive; outside and inside. Here just a brief look on the altar ...

 

Fast forward. We continued our bus tour until it gots dark ... and cold; as you may guess on the picture below. So we went back to our hotel and finally found a nice place to get our dinner. The very last evening with both Jacqueline and André. Somehow :-(

That's it. We will finish our journey tomorrow, after a short look inside the Colosseum.

Until then, please have a nice day!

Christoph

PS: The original posting with preserved formatting is located here.

Time Machine Reloaded - November 6th

Dear readers,

even today we do fight against some time constraints. So let's have a look what happened on ...

November 6th

The last day of the conference. It might be good for you that most of the day has been spend with personal chats and discussions. That makes this posting a bit shorter...

The first presentation I attended was "A new logo for OpenOffice.org" by Bernhard of the Art team. You may remember the poster stand which had been organized for that - I talked about that earlier. If you are interested in some more information, the presentation material has already been made available here.

After that, there has been the excellent presentation by Jacqueline and Oliver-Rainer who talked about "Lists and Outline in Writer" to be found here. Although the slides are available, you might miss the live demo unless you have a look at the video (starts at 57min).

Then, the day passed by ... unbelievably fast. Especially since there were many private discussions, even targeting critical questions with regard to the development of OpenOffice.org or the communication activities of Project Renaissance. I'd like to say "Thank you" to these people, who hopefully already know about that.

At the end of the day, the organization team offered a "town walk". Great, since there were some small sights and musuems we had not known about. On the left you see a picture which had been taken in the "Pozzo della Cava".

Time went by and it got dark outside. Let's share one of the night views of Orvieto.

Finally, we made it to "San Giovenale", a veeery old church built in 1004 (the picture on the right). I'm still somehow surprised how good the original picture looks for not having a tripod, using a consumer lens and an exposure time of over one second.

Okay, since we are discussing pictures and cameras - here is Bernhard who also tries to capture some of the nice parts of the church.

That's all for today, since I don't have pictures covering a very funny pizza (and many more things we'd tried) dinner in the late evening.

Oh, by the way, I already said that this was the very last day of the conference. So I would like to express my deepest thanks to all people involved.

Thank you for organizing, attending, chatting, improving, ...



But to me, it's not over yet. There are still two days of sightseeing I would like to share. Tomorrow, we will move on to Rome. Stay tuned :-)

Have a nice evening!

Christoph

PS: The original posting and formatting can be found on OpenOffice.org UX Team Blog.

Time Machine Reloaded - November 5th

Hi everyone,

let's go back the usual 7 days to re-experience the OOoCon 2009!

November 5th

From our point-of-view, it was "the day" of the conference. It was packed with User Experience related topics (conference program, page 2). Here are some highlights...

Ma Li from the IBM Lotus Symphony gave some nice talks, especially since he had used very entertaining and sometimes funny slide designs. Here, I can can only provide a picture shown the "default" design.

Basically, everyone talked about the same - how to better suit the needs of our users. Okay, we've also been reminded to avoid the impersonal term "user", so please exchange it with some person unrelated to OpenOffice.org but related to you. Then you better get the idea of what we are talking about.

Of course, Andreas talked about it, too. In his workshop "The role and the methods of user experience in product design" he took a more general approach why some products are more successful than others. Or let's say, what are the ingredients to develop a product which has the potential to be really successful.

After Andreas finished his workshop, there were about 10 people who attended our workshop "User Experience Done "Live" Based on Expertise and Usage Data". As far as I know, the attendees were volunteers and employees of Sun Microsystems and IBM. Since the workshop did take place in one of the usual presentation rooms, the equipment was somehow optimized for presentations instead of workshops. So we had to rely on the funny ODF note pads we brought with us - and the PLIO people, who were so unbelievable kind to provide a second data projector in the last minute. Thanks a lot for that!!! Unfortunately, there was somebody missing ... Mr. Internet Connection left the room right before and so we had only very rarely access to the Internet and the web sites we wanted to work with. What a pity, especially since some time we kept trying to get it working. However...

First, we presented our backup topics to let the attendees chose what to work on. Backup topics? Yes, because although we did some requests on mailing lists and in blogs, we didn't get any worked out proposal. Maybe our ideas were so bad that - at the end - the people in the workshop presented their own ones. So we got three excellent ideas to work on (described here). Due to the Internet connection problems, the attendees chose to work on "How to improve the quality of search results on the extension website?". Funnily, this idea had been brought in by Frank Mau (Sun Microsystems) who is also responsible for the User Feedback Data tooling. This data could have been used for questions dealing with the core product OpenOffice.org.

Frank explained the problem "offline" - if the user searches for extensions, the search results were sometimes sub-optimal which is related to the underlying search algorithm. Before starting to work on that topic, I gave a brief introduction of "user search strategies" and how this related to todays website features like: hierachical menus, tags and tag clouds, text search with synonyms. Concerning the search we worked out that a plain "text search" does not work well if a) there are far too many search results which might even be unrelated, and b) it doesn't work well if the user does not even know what term to search for (we tend to think technially, but most of our users are technically unbiased).

After some discussion it was raised that there were - literally - no resources to realize huge changes for the Extension Website. Keeping that in mind, we worked on some tiny but powerful proposals how to proceed (see here). If there would be a little bit more support, we also discussed how to re-arrange the elements on the website to provide access to the elements which were rather suited for the search (e.g. moving the tags a bit up). Finally, we had some intermediate result to further work on after the workshop.

Time was running - and still no internet connection - so we proposed to further inform about User Feedback Data and how to use it in the daily work. Agreement - and so Frank Loehmann gave a short presentation and I added a bit more "playing detective" with the source code browser OpenGrok to better understand the raw data. This could also be used for reference in the further analysis in the Project Renaissance.

Result: The workshop itself was quite interesting, especially for me :-) There has been positive feedback after the workshop, so most likely we will offer it again to further strenghten the cooperation in the community.

If you want to know more, here is the workshop wiki page, the videos / video streams and the presentation material.


And what is a day without a closing event? We enjoyed the party which has been organized by the NLC. Many thanks to the whole team!

That's it. You may now enjoy your very personal espresso - just go on. We'll see each other tomorrow!

Cheers,
Christoph

PS: Not to forget the reminder for the planet users, who want to see this posting well formed.

Time Machine Reloaded - November 4th

Hi TimeMachineFriends,

we already explored the November 2nd and the 3rd, now it is time for the first day of the conference ...

November 4th

The first "real" day of the conference started in an unbelievable room in the Palazzo del Capitano, which mixed both historical and technical elements. Here, we heard the welcome speak and the keynotes - especially the first one was very interesting to me.

If you are interested in any of the talks, the video streams can be found here. Unfortunately, they don't work well on my computer, so I cannot further comment on it...

However, you may notice that some of the folks (especially the people from the German community) have been quite busy during the talks. Maybe they already typed a live-transcript? ;-)

After the that, we moved on to hear Louis speaking about the state of the project in 2009. And - really great - he referred to Project Renaissance!



What a luck - Andreas and Frank gave a nice talk about the project right after. Unfortunately, the presentations files are not yet available, so you may prefer the video streams of the morning talks.

From my point of view, Andreas prepared a great presentation "to inform, to clarify, to motivate". Some people might have missed some examples, but from my point-of-view, the focus on the topic was quite right. Although the Q&A session afterwards showed, that we have to invest even more effort into communication.

For example, on person asked why we didn't work on "Macro Recorder" improvements so that everyone would be able to automate his tasks. To explain it a little bit further, Andreas talked about identifying and re-designing tasks which are important for the majority of users. For example (my example), inserting one or more pictures is a task which today requires many steps... Using the macro recorder would just mean to automate inefficient tasks which are still inefficient when used manually. And since selecting and positioning pictures still have to be done manually, that wouldn't change (or improve) that much. However, you might have a look at the videos for the Q&A.

Looking ... that reminds me that Bernhard from the Art team took the opportunity to present some of the logo ideas in one of the halls - the picture on the left. This hall did also accommodate the company booths.

After that day, we moved on to enjoy the dinner which - as usual - gave the opportunity to have nice chats with the others. For example, I would like to thank Frank Mau for his patience to explain of the OpenOffice.org tooling to me.

Besides the talks, I noticed some great wall decoration featuring some nice pieces of wisdom. You may notice that the following one seems closely related to usability and user experience in general.

That's it for today. Still, we didn't get any proposals for our workshop, so it seems quite necessary to finalize our own ones to be fully "backuped". We are really much looking for our workshop...

As usual, for the planet readers, you may better enjoy the "well formatted" posting on the OpenOffice.org User Experience blog.

Update update update: Andrea Pescetti of the Italian N-L provided a link to downloadable OGG video files of the talks. You find it here.

Time Machine Reloaded - November 3rd

As I said yesterday, let's push some buttons on the Time Machine to - again - go back 7 days. Let's re-experience some of the precious moments during the OOoCon...

November 3rd

I try to shorten this posting a bit - the day itself was quite nice, although you may miss some thrilling stuff. In the morning, we sat together in the lobby of our hotel to work on some mails and our presentations. You may notice that the time buffer for the presentations has been already close to zero...

After that, we continued our sightseeing tour - having excellent weather conditions. Thus, we had been able to enjoy the "Duomo di Orvieto" and the city's surrounding; but see for yourself.



To warm up for the conference, I did a short stop-over at the "NLC meeting". There, procedures and issues with regard to the translation had been discussed. Very interesting, especially since the look at the wider picture helps a lot ... important for UX topics which also heavily deal with texts and terms.

By the way, since many people believe that UX work is just the work on the (graphical user) interface, we went on to have a look beneath the surface :-) "Orvieto Underground" - a labyrinth of caves and tunnels...

Although some people might have wished that we would have stayed there forever, we were guided back to the surface. So we could join the first party were officials of the city welcomed us. Thus, thanks for the warm welcome, the cold beverages and the delicious goodies!

We finished our day in a bar... I'll skip the pictures - you know - low light conditions make it really difficult to work with the camera :-)

Tomorrow, I'll shed some light on the start of the conference and the status presentation covering Project Renaissance. Keep on reading!

Bye,
Christoph

PS: As usual, if you miss some formatting, please have a look at the original post on the OpenOffice.org User Experience Blog.

Seven Days Time Machine

Hi everybody,

some of you might have been at the OpenOffice.org Conference 2009 or already read some of the (few) blog comments. I'd hoped to provide similar insights like I did in my blog comments covering the OOoCon last year (first posting). Time for changing that!

But is a wrap-up sufficient? Surely not, since many little things happened which are worth mentioning... So what about a "Time Machine" to travel back 7 days? This would be a great chance to re-experience the great time we've had at the conference...

November 2nd

One of the best things being at the OOoCon is to meet other people who share the same ideas. Thus, I have been more than happy to meet André Schnabel right after my breakfast. Even better, he joined me to do some sightseing in Orvieto. There, Andreas Mantke was already awaiting us.

Our hotel was located outside the city, so we moved on until we - astonished - noticed that the center of the city was really sitting on a huge rock. See for yourself...

Once in the city, Andreas joined us and we started exploring. Of course, we wanted to see the famous "Duomo di Orvieto". It is somehow funny to go through tiny alleys and then - suddenly - a very huge building appears.

Don't worry, I'll post some more pictures when the weather improves. It was even a bit foggy that day...

Inside the building everyone will notice how well it is built and how good it was preserved over the centuries. Mmh, that seems similar to what we aim for with regard to ODF - being understandable even after a looong time. Moreover, being independent from the software which was used to create the documents.

Why this sudden change of subject? Because we noticed something noisy going on. So we went inside a building and found the people of the ODF|Plugfest celebrate their lunch break. Did you ever wondered how this looks like? Here are the action-packed photo ;-)



















The good thing is, that we've also met Oliver-Rainer Wittmann (on the right) who kindly supported us with a map and some leaflets covering touristic highlights. Thanks a lot!

I'll spare you the rest of the day ... except for the arrival of Jacqueline Rahemipour. After meeting her at the train station, we did one of the best things you can do in Orvieto - getting an excellent meal. You may have noticed the praises by Louis :-)

The choice was easy, since we had already promised to visit a pizzeria proposed by Stefan Weigel. Why? He had to cancel his trip right before the conference, which is still such a pity... we've missed him. However, a picture to prove that we've been there. You will easily recognize this to be a real "Italian" pizza...


Since we prove to be a real community, Jacqueline was so kind to share some pieces - hunger, anybody? The blurry picture is definitely caused by my shaking hands awaiting to eat ;-)


Okay, this was my first full day in Orvieto. Stay tuned for the next day - working, more sightseeing and - of course - the first party. What else should we do?

Time Machine "off" and back to now: I would like to take the opportunity to express my deepest thanks to anybody who was involved in making the OOoCon 2009 such a great success.

Read you tomorrow,
Christoph

PS: I know that the OpenOffice.org Planet sometimes has its own ideas how my blog postings should look like. It might be better to have a look at the original post on the OpenOffice.org User Experience Blog.

cappuccinOOo and more

The OpenOffice.org conference will start in a few days. It's high time to prepare for the stay - e.g. by consuming Italian style food and delicious coffee specialties. Today, I've added the second entry in my little series of "OOo logo interpretations": Two cappuccino and one espresso, per favore! :-)


Do you think I'm idling at the moment? If yes, then please consider to keep us running by submitting ideas to our workshop...

User Experience Done "Live" Based on Expertise and Usage Data

Up till now, nobody officially responded to our annoucement earlier this week. Maybe the reason is that we are question and issue free with regard to usability - which would be really great. But I really see the necessity for support when working with our software, trying extensions, reading websites, noticing user requests etc. Please, take that opportunity by either contacting us directly, or adding your ideas and questions to the wiki page.

I'm waiting for your input. Most presumably, I'll be awake for some more hours - I really had to consume the drinks mentioned above ;-)

We'll see us at the OpenOffice.org conference. I'm really much looking forward...

Christoph

Project “Renaissance” Kick-Off

Project Renaissance, to rethink the graphical user interface (GUI) and interaction of OpenOffice.org, was announced on OOoCon 2008 and has been officially launched this week. Renaissance is a long running project and will start from scratch, so please do not expect to see something in OOo 3.1.

Some details about the project
The project is divided in three phases:

1. Research
2. Design
3. Evaluation
   

Currently we are in phase 1 where we want to understand our users before we start designing anything. We will do usage tracking to get real data what our users do. We do surveys to understand who our users are and what they think about the product and we will do a lot more of things to understand our users (i.e. focus groups, Isometrics survey ). In phase 2 we will not limit ourselves to the possibilities of our current OOo GUI toolkit. We will create a list of requirements and the development will work to create a framework that could fulfill these requirements.

The Problem
Why do we run this project?

• OpenOffice.org users complain about its cumbersome and outdated graphical user interface (GUI)
• A great deal of functionality is hidden in many overstuffed toolbars, poorly structured menus and complex dialogs
• Functions are thus difficult to access for novice users or too inefficient to use for expert users
• In addition, the GUI offers an antiquated look & feel which is hardly capable to communicate innovation and to create joy of use

Our Mission

“Create a User interface so that OpenOffice.org becomes the users' choice not only out of need but also out of desire.”

Our Goal
... to know and to understand our users as they are, and to help them accomplish what they want to, by providing efficient access to valuable functionality through a desirable user interface.

Scope of the Project
We want to rethink the interaction and visual design of OOo. We do not want to build new features.

Project Home
Project Renaissance uses the Wiki for project coordination. As we start from scratch, you will currently find only basic information around the project. Details about communication channels (Wiki, Blogs, mailing lists) will follow as soon as possible.

This is a very important project for OOo and we are really looking forward working with the OOo community! So please stay tuned and participate!

Best regards,

Frank Loehmann
OOo User Experience Project Lead

OOoCon 2008. What's next?

Writing this blog post feels a bit like sharing my final thoughts about this year's OpenOffice.org conference. I still cannot believe that only one week ago, I sat in a plane on my way home - the last week passed by without noticing it.

Okay, even my connecting fly just passed by ... because our plane from Beijing was pretty late. So I "enjoyed" one additional night in a hotel nearby. At least, it was payed by the airline, but that did not make it more comfortable :-)

After my job took total control over me, I finally managed to upload my photos to share it with ... the world ... and you. I added some comments, so today I will just skip the explanation about what happened on our last day in Beijing (from the tourist point-of-view).

But, the days in China were not only interesting in terms of OpenOffice.org or visiting Beijing's sights. It was also very helpful for me to get some personal feedback by other community members. One example: People got the impression that the structure and argumentation in my emails made many discussion somewhat "final". From their point-of-view, this is a big problem for new UX members who want to contribute ... those members may be somewhat "frightened". I think that such kind of feedback is very valuable, and I will try to consider that in the future. And if you will ever notice that I "lost my mind" - remind me, please :-)

There are also other things I don't want to get lost. On my way back, I thought about how we can make our contributions more efficient and better in quality to get them better adopted by the developers. Another thought was how we can fulfill the mission statement of the new project "Renaissance" - creating innovation. The funny thing is, that most of the ideas to achieve that have already been mentioned in the last months. Either there was no time on my side or the discussion just got lost... So after this year's conference, my personal goals are:

• Create a place to collect new ideas. You may remember the discussion about UX brainstorming, I mentioned something like the "UX brainwaves" blog. However it will be finally called, it would be great to collect and discuss ideas in one place.

• Get a better understanding for data driven UX approaches. Some months ago, I asked what the UX community thinks about approaches like Personas. Personally, I'm convinced that this is the way to go for complex activities like "Project Renaissance".

• Working on the Writer's notes, again. After presenting the Notes development to the public, I would like to re-intensify my work on them. Yesterday I worked on the "Notes Ruler Control" which hopefully will make it into Writer 3.1. That would be great!

These are my personal favorites, so please feel free to propose topics which you think are important for UX. In the best of all cases, our goals match - especially for the ideas blog the UX project needs help: technical realization, design, ... and ideas. So is there anybody who wants to mastermind that?

That's it for today. Cheers,
Christoph

OOo Con 2008 --- Wrap Up

I was really impressed about the fact that this years OpenOffice.org Conference had 9(!) UX-related talks. This is really a success and emphases the importance of user experience in the whole OpenOffice.org Project. IBM and RedFlag presented [1,2] some pretty cool UI improvements realized on top of OpenOffice.org:



Image courtesy of RedFlag2000 Software CO.,LTD [3]

We've received pretty positive feedback on the User Feedback program and the Isometrics questionnaire [4]. Another talk I'd would like to mention is the "Learn more about office users - Feature usage study by document element statistic" presentation [5] (sadly not publish now). The IBM Lotus Symphony UX Team analyzed 1600 ODF, DOC public available documents for feature usage analysis based on document element statistics. They've figured out that:

* 41% of all documents contain tables
* 95% of all documents contain less than 10000 word (approx. 30 Pages)

As mentioned earlier, it is good to see that interest in UX-related stuff exist and rises. I hope that the next OOo Con brings up even more talks on User Experience related topics.

Best,
Christian


[1] href="http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008/programme/friday_1464.odp
[2] href="http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008/programme/friday_1484.pdf
[3] href="http://en.redoffice.com.cn
[4] href="http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008/programme/friday_1447.pdf
[5] href="http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008/programm/friday_abstracts.html#a1467

Get Three for One

Today, you will get some news from three days in one blog post. Unfortunately, the preparation of our presentation took more time than expected. But, let's just start with...

Thursday: Project Renaissance

Thursday was the second day of the conference - and it was still very inspiring. The most interesting part (at least for me *g*) was the announcement given by Frank Loehmann of the "Project Renaissance" (presentation "The State of the User Experience project"). This activity will lead to a new user interface and interaction concepts for OpenOffice.org. You are not dreaming, it seems to be true :-)

What should be achieved was formulated in the mission statement: "Create a User Interface so that OpenOffice.org becomes the users' choice not only out of need but also out of desire." Here is a snapshot of the presentation:

The announcement is just a start and can be interpreted like a commitment of Sun to support such an activity. So there are no concept or mockups available, but we all may contribute to improve OpenOffice.org concerning UX (usability, productivity, enjoyment). I asked Frank and he will provide more information to the community in the next few days.

Until then, we may have a look how Chinese travelers work as a community to support the bus driver (photo taken at the evening):

Friday: Our Presentation and The Closing Ceremony

Unfortunately, I do not have any photos of "Making the New Notes - Community, Collaboration, Concepts". Nevertheless, I think we did provide some useful insight in our Notes2 activity. But you may want to judge for yourself...

We had the last presentation slot and then moved on to a very fine hotel to attend the closing ceremony. Some speakers took us some days back in time and provided insight in their view of how the community evolved. Then, delicious meals were offered and we had the chance to see some Chinese acts (magicians, acrobats, fighters, ...):

Here, I would like to say thank you to our Chinese community and the sponsors which prepared and financed the OOoCon. My overall impression is that everything was really excellent! So again, a big thank you to all the supporters and volunteers!!!

Saturday: Tourist Trip Starts

When we registered, we have been offered to attend a two days tourist trip in the area of Beijing. So after getting up really early, we went to the "Great Wall" and back to Beijing to visit the "Bird's Nest". It is really impressive and it is hardly imaginable that, e.g. for the latter one, the Olympic Games have been there only few months ago. Between those sightseeing spots, there have be some arrangements to visit a Jade factory and a Silk factory - let's say that this caused discussion in our group :-)

At the evening, we went on to buy some small gifts and to get something to eat. And, like every day, the rest of the evening was spent in the hotel bar to meet the other community members and to strengthen our relationships. I'm pretty sure that I will miss some of the people when I leave...

Oh, due to the preparation of my departure, I'm not sure if it is possible for me to blog tomorrow.

Bye,
Christoph