LibreOffice 4.4 Is Coming Soon With New Features

[darkbasic]

I like Ribbons (even Matlab has them) but *please*, let us move these damn ribbons vertically or at least stop selling 16:9 laptops

[darkbasic]

Yes, we are using SSDs and it still takes 10 seconds for Word 2013 to start with a blank document.

Really? In an ultra low voltage laptop it takes less than half a second to start...

[nanonyme]

I like Ribbons (even Matlab has them) but *please*, let us move these damn ribbons vertically or at least stop selling 16:9 laptops

That sounds fine to me tbh. Everyone these days seems to want to stack everything to top or bottom of screen now that I think of that.

[prekarius]

Now in addition to pro-systemd trolls we also have pro-ribbon trolls. Not really surprising or unexpected but...

/sigh

Our company uses MS Office so I've had to deal with ribbon UI since 2008. And today, after seven years of working with this ugly abomination, I hate it as much as I did on day one. And MSO2013 UI is, if anything, even worse than MSO2007. And performance... I have no words. Yes, we are using SSDs and it still takes 10 seconds for Word 2013 to start with a blank document.

If any LibreOffice developer by any chance is reading this thread: please, don't listen to idiots who praise the ribbon. In the name of all that is holy, for the sake of our sanity (and yours) please, please keep the classic buttons and menus.

Clearly you are doing something wrong? In my current Win7 work laptop without SSD it takes less than a second to start with blank document and same goes with all document types.

But that is besides the point, when ribbons were introduced I was heartily against them but it took literally days to get accustomed to them and that is one of the big things I miss when working with LO when at home (Linux only household).

But, if codebase allows I have nothing against including both. That being said if there was one wish that would be multithreading. I frequently handle sheets with few hundred thousand rows and which unfortunately include as many sumproduct formulas and those calculate for a looong time.

[TheBlackCat]

I like Ribbons (even Matlab has them) but *please*, let us move these damn ribbons vertically or at least stop selling 16:9 laptops

I wouldn't consider Matlab a good standard for anything.

[JonathanM]

Reason being its (GTK3) eternal suckage?

I already imagine four buttons instead of whole toolbar, with all menu items hidden inside a nested 40-level deep menu....
And hyperugly window min,max,close buttons for those sane people, who don't use gnome3.

Please use your brain... GTK3 enables you to make applications with headerbars, popup menu's, etc... but this doesn't mean that you have to use these interface elements!
If someone were to implement headerbars in QT would that cause everything to use it and QT to suck?

The thing that you, and many others, don't like is the gnome design philosophy, gtk+ is not to blame.

[Bucic]

Opponents of the ribbon-type interface have either already memorized the awkward menu items locations or are close minded. Or both. Especially that ribbon is nothing but grouping and categorization of menu items.

[Sonadow]

I like the ribbon myself. The OpenOffice sidebar is functional but is no where as aesthetically pleasing or polished as the ribbon.

But Microsoft really needs to do something about the vertical space consumption; with every new version of Office the ribbon grows in height to accommodate larger buttons and icons.

[TheBlackCat]

Opponents of the ribbon-type interface have either already memorized the awkward menu items locations or are close minded. Or both. Especially that ribbon is nothing but grouping and categorization of menu items.

It isn't necessarily that crystal-clear. Ideally, you are right it would make sense. But it only works really well when toolbar items can only reasonably belong to one category, which in practice is often not the case. This can lead to problems when your mental image of how things should be grouped doesn't agree with the mental image of whoever put together the ribbon. This is a problem I often run into with ribbon interfaces: I often have to look through at least 4 different places to find what I am looking for because whoever designed the toolbar thought the item belonged somewhere else than where I thought it belonged. In this regard conventional toolbars are better (and sidebars are better still) because, even if the grouping is weird, everything is always visible.

This is particular a problem in something like Matlab, which only has a handful of toolbar items to begin with, it causes nothing but headaches. Developers padded the number of items by moving things out of the sidebars where they are close to and logically connected to the items they would be working with, and even then only ended up with three ribbon tabs.

On the other hand, something like CAD software, where there are a huge number of very closely-related tasks, I would think ribbons would be ideal.

MS Office is somewhere in-between. For someone like me who seems to have weird mental models, it is a problem. It is probably more useful to most people, though.

However, I still don't see a situation, at least on the wide-screen monitors that are typical today, where a ribbon beats sidebars.

[bpetty]

MVVM

I have not looked at the LibreOffice codebase, but seeing as how it came from StarOffice I am sure it is still a huge mess.

I would want them to modularize the code-base, create an extensible plugin framework (formats, grammar/spell check, themes, etc), use a good MVVM design pattern to abstract out the UI. Qt is very nice.