Why apps? But anywho.

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Why apps? But anywho.
by James Richard Tyrer on Monday 05/Jun/2006, @19:00

I continue to wonder why it is necessary to have separate Word, Spread, & Chart applications rather than having these integrated into one app that uses parts.

IAC, what I would like to see is to have it possible to link a number in a KWord document to a cell in a KSpread document and have it look just exactly like I had typed the number in the KWord document, yet if I change the spreadsheet, the number in the KWord document would change.

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Re: Why apps? But anywho.
by Boudewijn Rempt on Tuesday 06/Jun/2006, @00:40

Because for a certain task, a specialized interface is preferable. We discussed this a lot and came to the conclusion that it is much more userfriendly to have different interfaces for different main tasks. Especially the example of Gobe Productive argued in favour of our decision.

About sharing styles between different flakes -- that's something to consider. I don't know whether OpenDocument supports it, and if it doesn't, it will be hard to do, and getting inline data in a flake from another component will be a nice challenge, but as long as we're talking objects embedded in a text flake, doable. As long as OpenDocument supports it, of course.

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Re: Why apps? But anywho.
by Thomas Zander on Tuesday 06/Jun/2006, @00:44

Why apps?
because the user interface for a text processor still looks and acts more specialized for that type of data. Karbon will continue to have dockers and menus that are specialized for vector data while Krita will have menus with filters for bitmap data.
If all would be in one application we would either have 25 menus or alter our menu structure every time we make a selection. I somehow think that that approach will not be good for usability :)

The feature request for KWord <-> KSpread interaction is a good one, I'll push that out the the developers for consideration.

Thanks James!

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Re: Why apps? But anywho.
by Thomas on Tuesday 06/Jun/2006, @01:12

> we would either have 25 menus or alter our menu structure every time we make a selection.
Like MS Office does now? Funny how MS shoots it's customers in the knees over and over again...

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Re: Why apps? But anywho.
by superstoned on Tuesday 06/Jun/2006, @02:07

Have a look at Officd 12 - they did some great work on that app. It might look unfamiliar, but it works - seriously. The first thing from MS I would call innovation... It might not be totally new, but still its a great thing for Office.

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Re: Why apps? But anywho.
by James Richard Tyrer on Tuesday 06/Jun/2006, @07:39

Actually, I am only suggesting (at least to start) integration of the three major office apps: Word, Spread, & Chart. Embedding is sufficient for adding images.

Yes, the menu issue is one issue that would need to be solved to do this. And, I know that the KDE guidelines state that all operations that appear in toolbars must appear in the menu-bar menu.

I could probably list a handful of other issues, but I would look at these as challenges to be overcome rather than reasons not to try.

The first idea that comes to mind is to have a main menu bar that is always there no matter which part is active and an part menu bar for each part that only appears when that part is in use. I do not offer this as the ultimate solution, I am sure that with thought that we could come up with better ideas and refinements.

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Re: Why apps? But anywho.
by Jonathan Dietrich on Wednesday 07/Jun/2006, @12:22

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy for info about an app-less vision of Jeff Raskin. Very different way of looking at things.

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Re: Why apps? But anywho.
by Jay Pee on Wednesday 07/Jun/2006, @00:11

This has been done several years ago with StarOffice. That's why it takes so long to load, it is one app in different shapes. And as we know everybody complains about it being bloated.

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