LibreOffice community focus: Design
LibreOffice’s design community works on the software’s user interface (UI), improving its usability and accessibility. With LibreOffice 6.0 due to be released at the end of the month, we talked to members of the community to get their perspectives on the new version…
What have you been working on in preparation for LibreOffice 6.0?
Various things, including:
- New table styles and new gradients (click for bigger):
- Improvements to Notebookbars
- The LibreOffice 6.0 motif/splash screen:
- And menu and toolbar improvements
What are your favourite new features in this release?
Both GSoC (Google Summer of Code) projects are really nice: the revamped customization dialog, and the special character dialog with quick access from the toolbar. In addition, there’s the ability to rotate images to arbitrary degrees, and many other small improvements.
What tools and services do you use in the design community?
At the moment we use Balsamiq Mockups, but next we switch to Pencil. In addition, we use LibreOffice Draw (eg for the new motif) and Inkscape. For communication, we are active on IRC in the #libreoffice-design channel and Telegram.
Finally, how can people get involved with the design community?
- Join the IRC and Telegram channels, as mentioned above, or subscribe to the mailing list
- Comment on Bugzilla and/or file enhancement requests
- Participate in the weekly meetings
- More information on how-to contribute is on the wiki
A big thanks to the design team for their input and improvements in LibreOffice 6.0. For our final Community Focus, we’ll talk to the development community – more on that soon!
In my opinion, the team behind the Libreoffice suite should focus on a release for performance improvements. Nobody will ever care about any new stylistic changes or features in Libreoffice 6.0 (at it is now, the current feature list is enough for 90% of the users out there), if it takes time to start. The team should focus on minimizing startup times, lowering memory usage and making the core faster. Speeding up the suite will make a HUGE difference for people with PCs with 1 or 2GB, Windows XP, etc. I’ve seen many users comparing Libreoffice to MS Office 2003 (note the version, it’s 15 years back) and they simply hate it, because it’s slow, it screws up tables in Word files (.doc) and they don’t want to use it. Focus one year without adding any new features that few people will probably use and make the program faster, and people will love and embrace it.
Hi, we’re a volunteer-driven, community open source project – we can’t force people to all work on one specific thing for one year! It’s good that people want to work on lots of different things, and there have been many performance gains over the years, for instance:
https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-08-05-under-the-hood-5-0.html
Want to see more progress in that direction? Join us and get involved! https://www.libreoffice.org/community/get-involved/
Hi Mike,
My comment was strictly a personal opinion and it was targetted as a suggestion. Of course this is free software, powered by the work of volunteers and you can’t force the volunteer to work on something else, just because someone told them so. I’m trying to see things from the practical point of view. Having a moderate or slow application to do things is not good from the user’s perspective. And in order to fix such issues, the team behind this should focus on speed improvements.
In any case, the Libreoffice suite is excellent for what you pay for.
Thanks.
I really care about stylistic changes and improvements… So, somebody does. 🙂
On average computers LO works fine. Do you really want to compare it with MSO, which put’s parts of it’s program in the memory all the time – even when you don’t use it? You know, those fast starting times you mention, they do come at a price…
Why do you compare so old software? And statements from random users is not really worth taking serious. There are fanboys everywhere, who will trash any competitor. Look at Mozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome, or Nikon vs. Canon, or Apple vs. Android vs. Windows, or… you name it.
Are you absolutely sure, that the table-problem you mention is LO’s fault, and not a fault from MSO 2003?
Hi Lindy,
Don’t get me wrong. As I wrote in my reply to Mike (see above), I’m trying to see things from a practical point of view. This “random” user you say wants to get things done fast and doesn’t care much about stylistic improvements. And I’m not referring to a couple of users, I happen to work in a big government organization with hundreds of users. If you had them fill in a questionnaire about Libreoffice, I’m pretty sure the vast majority of them would say it’s a mediocre software, mainly of their perception of the software’s speed and its mediocre performance while working with compatible formats (see .doc and .xls files). Of course the latter is not Libreoffice’s fault. I always tell them use the native Open Document format if you want 100% compatibility with each other, but what must they do when they have to exchange files with third parties that don’t use Libreoffice at all? If you had them asked if they’d rather use Ms Office 2003 instead of Libreoffice, I’m pretty sure they’d choose the first one, even if it’s so old. We’re talking about computers that are more than 7-8 years old, running Windows XP.
I’m an open source proponent myself. I’m writing this from my Gentoo Linux installation at home (I don’t have a Windows installation at all), using Firefox, Thunderbird and Libreoffice when I want to do some editing of spreadsheets or rich text format documents. I can’t complain much about Libreoffice in my installation, it works pretty fast, but for my Windows 7 installation at work, I could use more speed. It feels rather sluggish.
In any case, this is my humble opinion.
I respect your opinion. 🙂
And I know a little about huge organizations, running software on very outdatet soft- and hardware. It’s a shame, but that’s how it is. On my computer – 2 yrs old – it takes approx. 3-4 seconds to start LO, and open a document. My guess is, that on standard hardware in organizations, it will take about 5-20 seconds… depending on network and the need for networking drives being mounted and stuff…
But I don’t blame LO for this… Espcially since a lot of hardware are designed to get sluggish with time – MS are no exception to this, neither are Apple and so on.
On Linux I find that it also runs pretty smoothly. 🙂
Telegram link is broken. Is https://telegram.me/libreoffice the correct/official one?
Hi Ivan, it works for me… The link you provided is for the general discussion group, rather than the one specific for design.
What about grouping images?
Hi Andrea, is that a feature you’d like to see? Have a look here: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/frequently-asked-questions/#features
That splash screen is awful – your eyes are drawn to the mess of boxes rather than the text, and the text doesn’t contrast well enough with the background.
Appreciate what you guys do, always excited for a new release!
I’m so happy every time I see improvements to LO. 🙂
Is it perfect? No, but really, it works, it’s great, and it keeps improving, and the price is awesome… I wish I could contribute – everyone who want’s software this great, costing this “much”, should try to help it along.
Thanks for this awesome work LO-team!
Thanks Lindy, glad you like it!
As designer, I do care about styles and sorry to say but that splash screen looks loke something from the year 2000.
The last one was way better than this.
Do you have a vote system to select the splash screen? Can people submit new images?