No Light Without Shadow

Hi all!

A German saying tells us "Wo Licht ist, ist auch Schatten" - this may be translated with "No Light Without Shadow". Well, since I perceive a lot of light with regard to the amazing progress of LibreOffice, there needs to be shadow as well.

Some of you might have noticed some "document border" discussion weeks ago. Sébastien already implemented a much friendlier document shadow for Writer (see here) on the basis of Andrew's idea in bug (or better: Easy Hack) 31251.

Since there had been some intensive discussions, I finally spend some time on this topic and wrote my first (more or less) serious specification for all the LibreOffice applications: Document Background

In short, here is the outcome if an improved document outline, a slightly revised shadow, and a gradient get combined ...

Sébastien replied that he'll working on an improved Draw/Impress shadow at the moment. I'm curious whether we can beautify and harmonize all components of LibreOffice. So far, a big thank you to Sébastien!

Back to the "Light / Shadow" topic. What if we add some more decoration - maybe some some Document Triangles ...

Where do these triangles come from? Something to blog about later ... maybe another Design Team guy will talk about it.

That's it so far ...

Cheers,
Christoph

Idea: LibreOffice Mail Attachment Service

During the time with OpenOffice.org, it was quite common to come up with some ideas from time to time. But during the amazing first months with LibreOffice, I simply lacked the time ... until now. So here is the very first idea that is aimed to improve the handling of mail attachments on the mailing lists.

Summary

Enable sending attachments to mailing lists and keep in mind: security, traffic, ease-of-use, costs and misuse potential.

Solution Proposal

If a mail from a subscribed person is sent to a mailing list, and this mail contains an attachment, then the attached file gets extracted from the email and saved on a server. Then, the system embeds a link to this file (or a website containing this file). After this, the mail gets delivered as usual to the mailing lists and the mail archives.

Here is a draft how this may look like for the mailing list members, once they get a mail that originally contained an attachment:

And now?

If you want to know more, please have a look at the full proposal at the dedicated wiki page. There, you can find some user stories, a more detailed technical description, and a extensive FAQ concerning this idea. Go, go, go :-)

Cheers,
Christoph

Design Team Kick-Off Step 3: We are the Design Team

Hi all,

a while ago I summarized the Design Team's current status of work - now I'd like to talk about the members of the Design Team. Who are they, what are they interested in, and how do they look like? Here we go ...

To get to know each other, we've asked everybody for some insights like "What are you interested in?", and compiled the Design Team member list. On this list, you'll also find some links to user pages with even more stuff you ever wanted to know (or maybe not).

What I can say is, that I'm pretty amazed who we are ...

• Some members have a professional usability and/or user experience background
• Highly skilled artists are with us - also with professional background
• There are new faces with lots of fresh ideas, and also long-term community members

Not to forget the "lurkers" who are subscribed to our mailing list. Some of them mentioned they want to follow our work first ... of course! I consider them more than important, since I hope they'll help us to keep some connection across the mailing lists (e.g. mentioning not to be missed topics on the development mailing list, or on the local mailing lists). By the way, the number of subscribed users is 106 (2011-02-07)

If you want to know more, see Kick-Off Wiki Page: Introducing the Team Members.

Well, it seems we are getting ready for some serious work ... :-)

Cheers,
Christoph

FOSDEM 2011 - summary

Hello world,

as others already pointed out, the FOSDEM was a great experience ... especially since I've enjoyed to see most of the TDF guys. So here some more pictures, and finally the link to my talk.

Experience

We had interesting talks, maybe because it was simple to identify the "green people"?

The developers prepared some USB storage with the complete source code, so that the people hanging around could jump-start to develop LibreOffice. But - apart from the interesting hacks - why should they do that?

As we did some awesome marketing (tm) before, here is another one: "Clothing for Code". So, if people completed an Easy Hack during (!) the FOSDEM, then they got one of those green hoodies.

If we continue with that initiative, we have some more proposals how to call that - summary:

• Hack for a Hoody
• Fashion for a Fix
• Clothing for Code

Rather late, I noticed that I lacked a picture of our devroom ... here is the very last presentation.

Please note, that another awesome marketing tried to support Kendy to get some of the money he privately invested to bring the clothes. It seems that it worked ... he can now go home. Safely :-)

Presentation
I've added my presentation "Kicking off the LibreOffice Design Team to the freshly created Design Team presentations wiki page. So if you want to have a look at it - here are the links: ODP, PDF. A video might be available soon.

Looking forward ... so many trade fairs and conferences to go :-)

Cheers,
Christoph

FOSDEM 2011 - first bits and pieces

Hi guys,

so here are some first impressions from the FOSDEM 2011.

The yesterday's FOSDEM Beerevent ... awesomely crowded, here you side a picture outside the café.

The first "real" day starts with an almost empty booth ...

... so get all the little gadgets ready ...

... unpack the freshly made "Freedom Never Tasted So Suite" shirts ...

... do some awesome marketing ...

... start talking to people to make them aware of LibreOffice ...

... continue to talk and realize that they are aware :-)

Thanks to all who made this possible!

Okay, back to the booth ... just wanted to share some things from the conference. Tomorrow will be even more interesting, since we'll get our Development Room to have some nice presentations.

Cheers,
Christoph

Design Team Kick-Off Step 2: Current Status of Work and Collaboration

Hi all,

this post announces the second step of our official Design Team
Kick-Off. It is about what we've done so far, and how we did it - thus,
it aims to get everybody "on track" who is interested to join, or to
collaborate.

So, please read the Current Status of Work and Collaboration

Some background: A few days ago, we've agreed on how to set up our Design
Team, and we've invited other parties to join - people having interest
in user experience, visual identity design, accessibility, and user
support and training. Together, we'll aim for "Make it just work, and
look great, too!"

Here is the general Design Team Kick-Off Page.



Cheers,
Christoph

Not even included, but already improved!

Dear marketeers, dear visual design loving people!

You may have noticed that the new LibreOffice icons "missed the boat" for the LibreOffice 3.3 final - as one of the developers said. Fortunately, they will be included in the upcoming minor release (see ReleasePlan).

But although the icons are not even included, there have been vastly improved - already. The guy who did that is the same person who initially led to the rumors concerning "interesting mockups" that have been extensively discussed on the TDF mailing list. Well, now he joined the Design Team and did not only provide deep insights in usability aspects, but also in his great design skills.

So this is what "Paulo" did for LibreOffice ... first, he improved the 128px icons (left side shows the old version, right side the improved one).

Next, he created the missing 256px icons that now provide a richness in detail, so that they can easily be used for marketing material. Click on it to see them in full size ... worth the effort :-)

Personally, I'm deeply impressed how much the icons gained - by keeping the metaphors. Now, I'm even more curious what the design team will come up with in the future. Both concerning making LibreOffice more usable, and caring about visual details.

And before I forget this: Thanks to both Paulo and the whole team for doing such great stuff! As Florian would say ... You all rock!

Cheers,
Christoph