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  KOffice 2 User Interface Design Competition
KDE Office Suite Posted by Inge Wallin on Thursday 22/Dec/2005, @12:24
from the get-rich-quick dept.
KOffice development is currently going on at a tremendous pace. Version 1.5, with Open Document as the default file format, will be released in March 2006, and it is time to start collecting ideas for version 2. KOffice has received a donation of $1000 to be used as the prize in a GUI and Functionality Design competition. So whip out the RAD tools and your imagination and design the next big thing in office automation!

An anonymous donor who cares a lot about KOffice has donated a sum of $1000 USD to be used as prize money in a design competition. The purpose of the competition is to generate new ideas for the user interface of the next generation of KOffice, which is expected to be released around the same time as KDE 4.0.

Submissions to the competition should be GUI mockups accompanied with a written description of the intended workflow with ideas for the design of KOffice 2. See the KOffice 2 competition page for an example of how this could be done.

In case the judges cannot find an entry that is truly best the prize money may be split between at most 3 entries. We do not expect this to happen, though.

There is no guarantee that any suggestion from the entries will actually be implemented in KOffice 2, but we will do our best not to waste good ideas. We also reserve the right to use any idea from any entry.

Our donor said "I believe in the potential of KOffice to become a better office suite than all the others in the market. It would be great for me and society to be able to buy KOffice which is better than Microsoft Office for the total price of 0 dollars."

Small Print:

The judges will be picked from the KOffice developers. Currently, Inge Wallin and Boudewijn Rempt are appointed, but there might be one more to make the number uneven. Those who enter the competition should be aware that there will be no other compensation paid ever, and that all ideas, graphical elements, workflows, etc, can be used in KOffice 2.0 and published under the GNU General Public License. The final decision of the judges cannot be overruled. Any taxes due will be paid by the winners.



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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
Let the clones begin :)
by Thomas Zander on Thursday 22/Dec/2005, @12:40
I naturally expect a lot MS Office 12 clones to be submitted and then discarded because they are not researched enough to ensure the result would actually be better then what we have now :)
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February or March?
by Dominik on Thursday 22/Dec/2005, @13:06
Here (http://www.koffice.org/competition/guiKOffice2.php) it says February the 15th, but here (http://www.koffice.org/news.php) March the 15th.

What is correct?
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koffice kids
by molnarcs on Thursday 22/Dec/2005, @14:38
I'm more interested in koffice kids :))) It is one of the best ideas I heard this year, and I think the edubuntu folks would appreciate it very much. I'm curious: have anyone contacted them about it?
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Nice, but...
by Meneer Dik on Thursday 22/Dec/2005, @14:50
This is all very nice, but as long as the print quality is as terrible as it is now (due to font kerning problems) KOffice isn't even usable in real life. Let us please get the basics right first.

I would love to start using KOffice (and I always try out new versions) but the printing quality is still horrifying.
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Please, embrace document processing!
by Lee on Friday 23/Dec/2005, @03:02
My advice, at least regarding KWord, is simple: dump the legacy word processing stuff. Have a long, hard look at how LyX works, and learn from it. Instead of having low-level options like Letter vs. A4 pages, bold vs. italic vs. underline, etc., have better, high-level options like "Book" vs. "Formal Letter", and "title" vs. "chapter" vs. "inline quotation".

Make sure LOTS of templates are included, and neatly categorised, so that people can easily find and begin the document of their choice. Make it even easier to actually write that document, because inserting elements is as simple as choosing them from the style list or the context menu (technical books would have options like "quotation", "callout", "illustration", etc.). Make it possible to download and *contribute* templates easily through an automated and rated version of KHotNewStuff.

Finally, make it really easy to edit these templates, ot to create your own, with a style creation mode, that works like an outliner, and has all the style options like font choices and bold, italics, positioning of elements etc., but that won't let you put actual content in from that mode, so users clearly see the difference in style vs. content, and can manage their styles easily, and contribute them to others.

Perhaps, also, for simple changes, styles could be easily modified in simple ways without getting into all the style mode stuff. So, you could choose to increase the overall size of all the fonts, or to increase the paper margins or make your book double-sided, without actually getting into all the gritty details of what elements a technical book has, and which headings are big and whcih are small etc. This could even be done with template wizards, which would run on startup (for your first book) or later through a menu item.

This sounds crazy to many, I'm sure. But, if you've ever tried LyX for document editing, you know that it's really a perfect way to write documents; the only thing missing is that setting up templates is a nightmare, because it's based on LaTeX. KWord isn't; it has a lot of great style and formatting technology, and I'm not suggesting throwing that away for a second. But, I think it should take its rightful place as an engine that drives styles, and not as a user-exposed thing, where users have to explicitly say that they're typing in 12pt font now, or that this is italic font, rather than "this is speech", or "this is an address", or "I'd like to insert a quotation".

By doing these things, you'll also make it possible to do more things. Obviously, if the word processor understands that something is an address, rather than just an indented block of text in a different font style, then it can do cool and intelligent things for you, like automatically handling address changes from KAddressBook. Or, if it knows that some quotations are included, it could easily generate a list of thanks to those inspiring writers/speakers at the end of the book.

If a word processor is better for writing documents because it knows the difference between lines and paragraphs and images, then just imagine what a document processor could really do, if implemented properly, when it knows you're writing a book, and that this is the title, and that is the first chapter, and this is a quotation, and that's speech, etc. The possibilities and new opportunities are endless. Just think of how it might go down in workplaces too, when secretaries and government document authors realise that they never need to worry about fonts again, and disabled users can have their interface described in terms of chapters and quotations and authors rather than paragraphs and lines and letters.

KWord already has the style mechanisms to do this, so why not use it? Make a document editing tool, and not a souped-up typewriter. Document processing is here, but no one has really done it yet. KWord could be a new killer app that everyone else is just slowly inching towards, if you let it.
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Textmaker 2002 interface!
by fast_rizwaan on Friday 23/Dec/2005, @07:26
it is very clean and simple, but very featureful. how many of us have tried the free version of textmaker which can be used freely (free as beer) and redistributed unlimitedly.

Textmaker is an alternative, efficient and powerful word processor for
Linux and FreeBSD systems. It starts quickly and contains a huge amount
of features. It is extremely easy to use, compatible to MS Word formats
and comes along in a modern look-and-feel.

Registration:
you can register (which is optional) easily by clicking "Register & Ordering" button when you launch the program.

download:
ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/SuSE-Linux/i386/9.3/suse/i586/textmaker-2005.2.11-3.i586.rpm

install and use:
rpm -ivh textmaker-2005.2.11-3.i586.rpm --nodeps --force

run:
/opt/textmaker/tml
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Export to PDF planned?
by Vlad C. on Friday 23/Dec/2005, @10:25
Since QT 4.1 was recently announced to have a PDF backend, will that make it easier for KOffice to have an "Export to PDF" functionality similar to OpenOffice 2.0?
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usability experts!
by Diego Calleja on Friday 23/Dec/2005, @11:54
Nice but...

"The judges will be picked from the KOffice developer"


Be sure to include some usability expert too!
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An interesting future OOo concept for OS X...
by Sven on Wednesday 28/Dec/2005, @05:47
... which could also be applied, maybe, to KOffice 2: http://www.vorbisinfo.org/openoffice .

Especially the tabs (and also the OS X-like toolbars and sidebars) would be a good thing, IMHO.

Only an idea, of course...
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New way of thinking needed.
by Uno Engborg on Monday 02/Jan/2006, @09:48
Even though it is nice to get KWord, KSpread and KPresenter improved, I think we need to rethink the concept of an office suit. Today programs like MS-Office, OpenOffice.org, and KOffice are no more than glorified typewriters and adding machines.

They are a reminicence of the days when you put a piesce of paper in your typewriter, wrote a document and then stored it in a binder on a shelf or in a file cabinet. The only difference is that now the file cabinet is a digital artefact. A computer should be able to do a lot more than that.

For one thing, current office suites catches very little of the dynamics and business processes going on in an office. They are very poor at relating piesces of information to each other in a way that makes sense from a business perspective. We lack things like workflow handling, and collaborative tools.
They also doesn't describe the work process in business terms. E.g. projects, customers/clients, employees,...

In short, they are document creation suites, not office suits. What I would like to see are tools that make it simple to tie the various components together. E.g. if you create some type of document that needs to be approved before it is published, it should be possible to create a template for such behavior, so that when the worker selects "new publishable document" it should turn up in the managers todo list as soon as the employee signals that he thinks its ready, and if the manager approves it it should be published automagically and if he doesn't approve he should be able to send it back to the employee with a comment on why.

It should also be possible to let documents and workflows to be part of projects, and it should be possible to create project templates containing certain documents. If a users selects "create new project" he would perhaps get a gantt diagram, an empty or partly filled out project description, all depending on how the template project was defined. Such templates should also make it possible to ask for what human resources that should be part of the project and perhaps set up mailinglists and define calendar categories for the project. It should be possible to right click on a part of the gantt diagram to create new documents associated with a certain project part. Another possibility would be to drag documents, meeting and address book references to the gantt diagram to associate them with a project or a certain part of the project.

Another idea would be to make all of it more or less webbased, using serverside storage for easy backup, and cross platforms components tied together by web technologies like html/xml/xforms and cross platform browser plugins. That way deployment costs could be lowered.
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Been done with Office for years
by Jason on Sunday 05/Mar/2006, @16:43
I believe starting with the 2000 version of Office, there has been an increasing level of integration via SharePoint and Exchange. I worked at a lawfirm where several people would be working on 200 - 300 plus page documents with graphics pros, Excel people, secretaries, the attorneys on both sides, etc. all collaborating all at the same time. The Word doc would be the master with several people working on the various sections in chapterized form according to their specializations with the graphics, spreadsheets, and merge data all dynamically flowing in from other departments. Sign-offs and edits went through to all the people they needed to through SharePoint and via Exchange for outside council. It all plugged into the document management system, iManage.

What I would be looking for is an entire enterprise level document system with per user controls, auditing, document management, compliance devices, access controls, edit routing, plugs into a robust messaging system, tight integration with several tools (think a stable API), etc. Most, if not all, of the editing abilities are there already. Of course, this would have to be Windows native. Sorry, but there are too many apps that are absolutely necessary for my company to switch.

So I am waiting for KOffice 2.
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