Saturday, February 13, 2010

Back me up, Scotty! Aehm, BackupPC.

What a week. After the Community Council Meeting...
  • I visited my family (for e.g. 70th birthday party),
  • came home (and fought against my Inbox *g*),
  • went to a two days business trip (exhausting and the current train situation a bit annoying...),
  • spent a nice evening with my colleagues (oops, I totally forgot about our Indian style dinner),
  • in the same night, I helped my neighbor since her husband had a hypoglycemia and required emergency medical services,
  • then overslept the day after,
  • tried to support some colleagues with their pilot study (some computer in the network did say goodbye), ...
... and finally I got called by my girlfriend who told me that her computer had been stolen. Oh dear, what's next?



Unfortunately, she requires the notebook computer for her day job, so there wasn't that much time find a suitable replacement. Now, about 24 hours later, we already bought another one, set it up with Ubuntu Linux, and restored most of the data.

Why is that so important that I wanted to tell you in a blog post? The reason is to say "Thank you!" to the people in other open-source projects who do a great job to make others' lifes easier. For example BackupPC - the system that saved (most of) my weekend :-)

BackupPC resides on a little server and scans the computers in the local network. If it detects a known one, it connects via a SSH tunnel and syncs the files to RAID disks. The file history can then be accessed via a web interface which also provides to (usually) easily restore them including access rights. The goood thing is, no one has to worry about doing the backups manually.

So please guys, keep an eye on your data. Usually, one realizes how important it is once it is lost... :-)

Bye,
Christoph

Monday, February 8, 2010

CC F2F Meeting in HH

The heading seems to be a bit cryptic, isn't it? It is about the "Community Council Face-To-Face Meeting in Hamburg".

We, the Community Council, had the chance to meet each other in the real world. Two days to catch up with all the tiny bits and pieces which are sometimes so incredibly difficult to discuss - mainly via IRC and in parallel with the "competing" usual project work.

The folks at the Hamburg office offered a warm welcome - many thanks to Jürgen and the members of the Team OpenOffice.org e. V. who cared about our creature comforts.

This is how the participants looked like - just a snapshot since we missed any opportunity to posture ...



There were some interesting information and sometimes even strong discussions. Hardly surprising, since each of the council members has a certain viewpoint. As you may know, each of the members is elected by a special constituency, so that the person can represent the interests of a certain group in our whole community.

Besides he official discussion there were - maybe even more important - the lesser official discussions until late in the night. I can just repeat my request to everyone to use any chance to attend such a local meeting or even conference ... :-)

Here is a picture of what happened with the results ... aehm ... the media which was used to collect the results.



You may take the chance to have a look at the draft minutes John was so kind to prepare. Most probably, there will be some more information in the near future. Until then we have some more Action Items which have to be resolved ... let's go!


That's it - many thanks to all the people who were directly and indirectly involved!

Christoph

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Brainstorm New Ideas: Contextual Undo


Last year I started a small series of brainstorming ideas for improving OpenOffice.org. So maybe you remember the idea Document Check which was targeted to make finalizing documents more easy. Now let's continue with...

Contextual Undo

Idea Summary

The central idea of "Contextual Undo" is to let the user revert changes in a certain part of the document only. Thus, it overcomes the basic limitation of the conventional undo functionality which basicly is a linear list for "editing steps" for the whole document.

Rationale

Productivity software like OpenOffice.org provides different functionality to revert changes in a document. A very common one is "undo" which enables the user to revert changes of the current document editing session step-by-step. When looking on the following - rather simple - document workflow, then we'll now focus on the step "Modify".



Let's first have a look how the today's "undo" functionality is presented to the user. The following screenshot, which shows the expanded "undo" drop-down in the standard toolbar, will be used to explain the behavior.



 The current "undo" functionality ...
  • ... provides a list of editing actions in reversed order (e.g. "Insert graphics" was the last one)
  • ... is rather independent of the kind of actions (e.g. typing, inserting, deleting)
  • ... already merges 'atomic' steps into more logical larger ones (e.g. typed words instead of single letters)
  • ... helps the user by showing the number of actions to be undone (e.g. "Actions to undo: 5")
  • ... has only a limited number of actions to be undoable (see Tools -- Options -- OpenOffice.org -- Memory -- Undo)
  • ... is a document-centric functionality and therefore e.g. available in the standard toolbar
There are many little things to be improved with regard to the OpenOffice.org "undo" functionality, but at the moment the very last last statement - being document-centric - is the one to be adressed. Thus, you may have noticed that the user (you?!) can only undo his actions step-by-step. Even if the user choses to go back five steps, then OpenOffice.org executes "undo" five times one after another. It is impossible to only revert one step (or a series of actions) which has been applied in the past.

Goal: The user is able to simply revert changes to a certain element in the document without affecting the other changes made during the document editing session.

Use Cases

Use Case 1: Reverting Unwanted Changes in a Calc Sheet

Sara uses an OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheet document to do her private accounting. The information is spread among different sheets, so she works on some parts of the document. Unfortunately, she made some little mistake in the one sheet she worked on several minutes ago. Since she doesn't want to loose all her work, so she decides to use the "contextual undo" functionality which makes it really easy to revert the changes in the selected sheet. She can continue to work on seamlessly and focus on the topic.

Use Case 2: Reverting Changes of Pasted Content

John works in a large company. His boss requests to create a new presentation which presents the project he currently works on. He collects the related documents - texts, diagrams and graphics - and starts to compose the presentation. To keep the presentation document in a reasonable state, he first adapts the information and formatting in the source documents before pasting the content in the OpenOffice.org Impress document. For example, he adds some text which better explains the information in the given context and adds it to slide 3. Later he notices that some of the information is somehow doubled on slide 12 - it seems that the current source document already contained it. Thus, he wants to revert the changes on slide 3 with "contextual undo". Luckily, OpenOffice.org keeps the full editing history of the text which has been pasted and so he simply reverts some of the text changes without affecting the rest of the document. He is happy that this saved some time, since his boss needs the presentation in less than one hour.

Use Case 3: Working on the Bachelor Thesis

Michael works on his bacholor thesis in OpenOffice.org Writer. Since he lacks a bit concentration today, he jumps back and forth in the document and works on different sections. After a break, he briefly scans the changes made to the document and wants to revert some text he worked on some hours ago. He selects the modified paragraphs and executes the "contextual undo" - he browses the history of the changes and reverts all the unwanted changes with one click.


Detailed Description


Read on in UX Idea Contextual Undo (Wiki) ... here is a first "sneak preview".


Closing Words

My girlfriend loves fortune cookies on the New Year's Day and so I picked one, too. The message was: "Your head is full of new ideas. Apply them!" Okay, I do. But you, please don't forget to rate them ... or even better ... add your own!



If you are interested in more ideas, then please check out the Wiki category UX Idea.

Bye,
Christoph

Friday, January 15, 2010

UX meeting in Hamburg, Day Two

Introduction

This is my second – and last – posting which covers my two days stay “UX meeting in Hamburg”. In the last posting, I've talked about non-disruptive messages and the common goal for OpenOffice.org. Now, we will have a look at Impress and the printing improvements.

Christian and “What is going on for Impress?”

I had the chance to attend the meeting of the Renaissance team which currently works on the thinning out process for Impress. As discussed earlier, this process is intended to “clean up” the current user interface of Impress with the goal to ease the work on major improvements planned in the future. So let's state that we currently talk about how to improve the already well-known user interface.

The design principles are currently a bit implicitly stated, therefore I would like to turn it into something more explicit (as it has been explained to me)....
  • Only important things (I repeat, important things) should be made available in the toolbars
  • Some (currently unnecessary modal) dialog content might be considered for being used in the task pane
  • The task pane will be improved to be more usable on small screens
At the moment, I want to talk about the last item – how to improve the task pane. So why is this required? There are several reasons, but let's pick out two of them which mainly deal with the task selector elements:
  • They eat a lot of space: Each element is presented and therefore reduces the available space. Especially for the vertical arrangement of user interface elements, this is problematic. I've added a screenshot below how Impress looks on my 1280x800 notebook screen. You may notice (highlighted area) that the space being available for animation effects is … limited.
  • They require large mouse traveling: Especially if people search for a certain option this is even worse – they may explore the interface by clicking through each available task selector pane. Although we try to take care of how things are named, people might not be aware of the meaning of “Layout” and “Master Pages”.

But there are also advantages with regard to the current solution – the reasons for which they had been selected initially. For example, each task pane name is directly visible (e.g. “Layout”). If we would use icons alone, we might end up with the problems of the navigator and stylist. Many similar looking icons for context change and – at the same time – many clueless looking eyes ;-)

Okay, how to improve that? Some days ago, Christian Lippka already published an early visual example on Youtube which saves much space and which has been discussed in the Renaissance team. Finally, Christian Lippka, Frank Loehmann and myself ended up in discussing advantages and disadvantages of this and alternative designs. And, luckily, we were able to use the solution proposal by the IBM Lotus Symphony team which has been added to our wiki some time ago.

Within the discussion Frank sketched a proposal which presents versatile task pane content which might be docked on different places. It may be even present at “context” locations, e.g. selecting the slide layout directly on the slide. That leaded to the question whether toolbar content and task pane content etc. have to be technically different (with regard to future developments). If not, then this might ease the realization of an even more optimized UI in Renaissance.


We started to summarize the ideas in some wireframe mockups which also contain some explanations how it might finally behave. This time, I was in charge to produce something – and Frank took to opportunity to take a picture.


Please click on the graphic to explore the details.


I think, one of the most elegant ideas is the (decent) fading of the task pane content during mouse over on tabs. That would make it possible for the user to simply move the mouse pointer down (on the tabs) until she or he finds the appropriate element (in the contents area). A simple click makes the tab persistent. For most users, this might be far more efficient than looking on the headers only – since people usually search for visual clues (like the slide designs).

Like usual some of the ideas aren't technically feasible, but we agreed on some basic behavior which may even be realized for the upcoming OpenOffice.org 3.3. Stay tuned and keep your fingers crossed ;-)

Philipp and “Printer Pull Pages”

One thing I'm particularly happy about was the meeting with Philipp Lohmann, the guy who is the I-Team lead for the printing improvements for OpenOffice.org (printerpullpages). We are working on this topic since several months but we've met never before … a great opportunity to change that.
But, I am sure that we talked about many – to you – less interesting details, I'll skip much of the discussion. The main message is, that we will further work on improvements for the printing. For example, we discussed the necessity of the small “Print in progress” dialog which is shown after clicking “Print”. This modal dialog be even replaced with a non-disruptive message (see above). You may notice how well things fit together, don't they? ;-)

The End

That's it for now. I hope you enjoyed some – if not all – of the topics...

Bye,
Christoph

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

UX meeting in Hamburg, Day One



Introduction


Last week I was on holiday from my day job so I went to Hamburg to spend time on my hobby: OpenOffice.org. I experienced the kind and warm hospitality of Sun, especially the Sun User Experience team and had the chance to get in contact with some more “new” people and discuss some topics which have been around for a while. I will report on my visit in two parts. Today is Part One.

Malte and “How to Use Non-Disruptive Messages?”

One of the first meetings was a surprise: Malte Timmermann asked me to discuss some details of a non-modal information bar which I wrote about two years ago; you may recall the Direct Manipulation Snippets for Documents. In general, this kind of non-modal interaction/information elements are used in many different applications like Mozilla Firefox, Gnome Desktop, Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft File Explorer (Vista), Ubuntu Desktop, … For OpenOffice.org you may simply think of an information bar above the document view port which communicates simple information or warnings. During our meeting, Malte referred to one of my use cases which I would like to quote again (to be found in the wiki):

Example 2 “Macros”: If a user opens a document containing Macros, she/he is asked to confirm the execution of the macros. Until the confirmation, the user has no chance to see the document content. So why not loading the document without executing the Macros and asking the user afterwards for the permission?

If you read the wiki page thoroughly, you may have noticed that these “additional” Direct Manipulation Snippets for documents don't yet consider all kinds of situations. This was the reason for Malte to ask:
  • What if several messages shall be shown at the same time? For example, four messages would cover large parts of the document or may be bigger than the whole OpenOffice.org window. How to present them?
  • What if a user wants to recall a message which has been shown to him some time ago? For example, do we require some kind of message stack to be accessible afterwards?
  • What if a message is rather large, e.g. a user shares a document in a Document Management System and adds a rather large comment? How to show this message to the user – instantly – without requiring a large part of the window area?
  • What if a message is related to OpenOffice.org in general, e.g. the invitation to join our OpenOffice.org Improvement Program or to inform about software updates?
… and much more. You see, the discussion isn't finished yet. The funny thing is that – during the discussion – we collected more and more ideas for using this kind of non-modal interaction to make working with OpenOffice.org more pleasing and more efficient. Some examples:
  • If users add comments/notes without having entered a user name, we may ask him to add this information when required.
  • If users open signed documents we could explain to them what signed documents are. Today, many people don't know much about that.
  • If users add extensions we might inform them about the newly added functionality.
I think you got the point why I think it is worth to work on it. Let's see if Malte and his colleagues share that opinion.

Kay and “What is our common goal?”

Kay Koll is the friendly marketing guy who, for example, publishes the monthly newsletters to the OpenOffice.org community. During lunch, we started a nice discussion about what goals exist for working on OpenOffice.org. If the goals are inconsistent or unclear, for example when working on the core functionality, documentation, web presence, etc, we face inconsistency and diverging development. Thus, we talked about how to make working on OpenOffice.org more target-oriented.

For example, we talked about the current improvements like “release mottos” for upcoming versions and the current – rather technical – mission statement. You may know that large organizations, both non-commercial and commercial, invest a lot of effort in developing a common mission and goals to be used in all their projects, teams,etc. Personally, I think that this kind of “tool” might help to ease development decisions. However, our discussion ended up generating some ideas for an upcoming visual design and branding meeting , so, we decided to wait for the outcome of that meeting.…

The Small Print

I would like to say a bit thank you to Liz who took care of me, like she did for other community members some months ago :-) She provided (as she called it) a warm and dry place to sleep and (as I would refer to) some delightful discussions apart from OpenOffice.org and all the development stuff. The same is true for the hospitality of Frank who arranged many tiny things to make my stay as comfortable as possible.

Besides that, many thanks to all the people (Christoph Lukasiak, Christian Jansen, Matthias Huetsch, Eric Savary, …) who discussed all the ideas and thoughts – or just dropped by to say hello! I hope to see you again, soon...

Have a nice day!
Christoph

Friday, January 1, 2010

Happy New Year!


Also from my side a happy New Year and the best wishes for you and the whole OpenOffice.org community in 2010: health, happiness, success, luck ... and an increased market share for OOo :-)

Christoph

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Brainstorm New Ideas: Document Check


Hi everyone,

although Renaissance keeps me sometimes rather busy, there are still some ideas to make OpenOffice.org more user friendly, making working with it more efficient and reduce potential document issues right from the start. Since we currently lack a common idea handling, I feel free to publish some of the ideas in this blog. Let's start with ... tada ...

Document Check

Idea Summary

The idea is about a "Document Check" functionality which checks the document for typical issues with regard to security, compatibility, content, understandability, graphical design and accessibility. The document check result provides central information on issues which have been found, where they have been found and - if possible - proposals to correct the issues. Usually, the functionality may be called manually by the user, but it may be also executed automatically.

Rationale

Today's documents are created for various purposes and published in different channels. Even with the numerous functions available in OpenOffice.org or being available in extensions, it still requires some experience to make sure that each document can be shared without problems. The following - rather simple - workflow shows the steps required to create or to edit any kind of document. Here, we want to focus on the step "Check".



In this step, prior the document is shared (e.g. printed, uploaded, converted to PDF), experienced users check the document for various issues. For example, a user may search for missing references indicated by the field text "Error: Reference source not found", look up non-embedded graphic files in the menu "Edit - Links...", and check whether there are hidden comments with "View - Comments". In any case, these steps require both experience and effort to look up the different places. What seems missing is a central place to check the documents for common issues prior the document is shared.

Goal: The user is able to simply check the document for common issues. Most of these issues can be resolved with the help of functionality available in OpenOffice.org.

Use Cases
The following use cases are just examples. There are some more on the wiki page...

Use Case: Keep Corporate Identity

John works in a large company which really cares about the visual style of internal and external documents. Thus, the company provides in-depth information how templates, colors and fonts have to be used to ensure high quality corporate identity. But, John finds it difficult to keep all the information in mind, when working on documents. Especially, since his technical documentation or specification documents are based on various sources and content types. Thus, after finishing each document, he executes the Document Check which informs him about potential Corporate Identity issues and also provides some hints to resolve these issues. Usually, everything is just fine.

Use Case: Documents for Everyone

Jane is a very active member in a non-profit organization. Recently, she agreed to take over the work on the internal magazin for the members and other interested people. After finishing the draft, she executes the Document Check which provides useful information on the style of the document. She is told that the document might look better when using less different font types and sizes. Additionally, the readability analysis proposes to use less complex sentence structures. Finally, the Document Check informs her about some color combinations which might make reading very difficult for people with limited eyesight (color blindness) - approx. 7% of men are affected. She didn't know about that, so she jumps to the page with a click and changes the document accordingly.

Draft Mockups

Mockup showing a document without any problems identified...

 Mockup showing critical issues. At least from the company's point-of-view...

Mockup showing one severe issue and other proposals to improve the document...

Proposed Items to be Checked

The proposed items to be checked are ... Okay, that might be less interesting for you. Not??? Then please continue on the wiki page dedicated to "Document Check"...

I hope you enjoyed the blog post. Please tell me what you think about the idea on the wiki page. And - of course - please add your own experience what items should be checked or how this proposal can be further improved.

Personally, I think this capability would be unique for office software and might just rock ;-) At the moment, it's just an idea without developer support...

Bye,
Christoph