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The prototyping phase, to create a new user interface for OpenOffice.org, has ended last week. See our monthly project Renaissance status presentation for July and try the prototype yourself (Java 6 required).
The Renaissance Project team, part of the User Experience Project (UX) at OpenOffice.org, have announced that the Renaissance prototyping phase that began on the 12nd of June, will end on the 24th of July. The goal of the prototyping is to build "a flexible framework for mid-fidelity prototyping to test promising UI designs with real users".
The OpenOffice.org team has been experimenting with a new user interface for the suite of programs, and they've presented the first rough prototype of this new interface, more specifically for Impress. The general gist? It's Microsoft Office 2007's ribbon interface.
Two weeks ago Project Renaissance unveiled its first prototype. The prototype resembled the Ribbon interface first introduced in Microsoft Office 2007, and the denunciations came so fast that few bothered to check the facts, or to give the idea any serious consideration.
The open-source faithful are lambasting a proposed overhaul of OpenOffice.org's user interface, with critics saying it would "ape" Microsoft Office's controversial Ribbon layout.
The ability to save user settings can come in handy if you want to make your OpenOffice.org solutions more flexible, efficient, and user-friendly. In this article, we take a look at how to save user settings in a plain text file and then retreive them from there.
Remember the OpenOffice.org prototype? Now you can try the Renaissance Impress without any installation (but you do need Java installed). Remember that this is just a prototype, only to be used to see how it looks. That being said, you can download the Impress prototype from HERE.
In a long-term project, the OpenOffice team wants to thoroughly rework the free office software's user interface. This was already widely expected to happen with version 3.0, which no longer looks contemporary in many users' eyes. In addition, the office suite's menus have become so cluttered and badly structured that users find it impossible to locate certain functions
