Christoph Noack writes about user experience prototyping strategies, based on a presentation he attended at the CHI conference a few weeks ago. He covers the importance, in wireframing, of capturing essential elements while avoiding distracting detail that is not relevant to the design stage.
Current efforts to improve the OpenOffice.org StartCenter are in this process now. (My concept for the Dashboard is described here.)
Linux Identity has released its annual OpenOffice.org special issue, and I can happily announce that I’ve written four articles in this one. My pieces include the editorial/intro to the issue, new features in Calc, web based resources for OOo, and popular and useful extensions.
You can order a copy from the Linux Identity web store or pick it up in Border’s bookstores.
Today is Document Freedom Day, a global day to promote awareness of the importance of open document formats and open standards like ODF (OpenDocument Format) and HTML.
To catch up on what’s happening around the world today, see the Document Freedom Blog.
For an OpenOffice.org perspective on Document Freedom Day, see Louis Suarez-Potts’ post titled Document Freedom Day.
WorldLabel.com’s blog describes a new OpenOffice.org Extension in Dmitri Popov’s post “Turbocharge OpenOffice.org Writer with AuthorSupportTool.”
The AuthorSupportTool (AST) extension… dramatically enhances the word processor’s functionality, turning it into a powerful tool for working on research papers and complex documents.
AST provides a number of features, including a Template Wizard with templates for major types of academic documents, a tool to manage bibliographic references, and “focal points” and “work progress” indicators.
These latter two are unique tools. Popov explains, “You can think of the focal points editor as a graphical non-hierarchical outliner which you can use to manage the document structure as a flowchart. The clever part here is that once the flowchart is ready, you can convert it into the traditional document structure where each node (or focal point in AST’s terminology) becomes a document heading.”
The Work Progress function “provides a visual timeline as well as essential info about the current document, including word and page count, number of illustrations and tables, and so on. Here you can also specify the duration of the project and set milestones.”
In recent discussions of OpenOffice.org marketshare, two key facts stand out. The first is that OOo’s marketshare is much higher than most observers expected, and the second is that Microsoft Office’s marketshare is much lower than common knowledge has long dictated.
The current discussion of market share was first touched off by Webmasterpro.de, which published “International OpenOffice Market Shares” about a week ago. In this article, author Thomas Hümmer was able to determine approximate installed base / market share of OpenOffice.org and other competing office suites and broke down the numbers by country. Leading countries include Poland and the Czech Republic at 22%, Germany at 21%, France at 19% and Italy, Spain and Denmark close behind.
Hümmer points out some contributing factors to these high numbers, including the fact that many of their public administrations have adopted ODF or OpenOffice.org for their own use. He also notes the correlation between high adoption of OOo and Firefox, which itself has nearly 50% market share in both Poland and Germany, an increase from several years ago, when Firefox was in the same range as OOo is today. OOo’s continued growth thus seems very likely to follow a similar trajectory.
And what of the low marketshare numbers posted by MS Office? For years, common knowledge has been that “everyone has Microsoft Office” installed, which, to give it a number, one might translate to 95%. However, Webmasterpro found no country with greater than 88% penetration for MSO, while most were much lower (the USA only posted 75% installation of MSO, in fact). Germany and Poland were even lower, at 72% and 68%, respectively.
More discussion of this interesting new information can be found at Computerworld UK, in “Has the Irresistible Rise of OpenOffice.org Begun?” by Glyn Moody, at OStatic’s “OpenOffice.org by the Numbers” by Joe Brockmeier, and in many other recent articles.
ODF support in more applications is always a good thing. It provides further utility to users, expands and strengthens the software ecosystem, and demonstrates the superiority of open data formats.
Along these lines, Bob Sutor asks, “What would ODF support for WordPress look like?”
“Thinking of WordPress as a content management system, importing an ODF file means taking a word processing, presentation, or spreadsheet document and putting into a form that can be saved and displayed by WordPress, either in a blog post or a standalone page. For simple text, this would mean translating to HTML. Doing a bit more work, it could mean using HTML and CSS for formatting. Getting even fancier, it could incorporate extra JavaScript or PHP code to handle spreadsheets in a live manner.”
He points out a Drupal module serving a similar purpose, and collects some good comments from Rob Weir and Walt Hucks helping to further develop the idea.
Danish OpenOffice.org project members pointed out the Danish Parliament’s decision this week to require government data be stored in open formats. They developed a list which explicitly included ODF and excluded MSOOXML.
The original article can be found at: ODF Wins the Document Format War (via Google Translate).
It’s also covered in English at The Register (Danes Ditch Microsoft, Take ODF Road – At Last) and OSOR.EU (DK: Danish state administrations to use ODF).
The Register: “Parliamentary parties decided – after four years of deliberation – to use the Open Document Format in all Danish state office documents.”
OSOR.EU points out:
“The open standard ODF is recognised by many European member states. Next to Denmark it is also a national standard for public administrations in Belgium, Germany, France, Lithuania, Sweden and the Netherlands. ODF is recommended by Norway and it is one of the document standards at NATO.
“ODF is a document standard supported by many office applications, including most open source office software packages. The list of software companies supporting ODF include Sun Microsystems with its StarOffice, Google with Google Docs, IBM with Lotus Domino and Workplace. Microsoft supports ODF in the second edition of its 2007 version of its Office suite. Earlier versions require a plugin made by Sun Microsystems. ODF support is also included in the office suite Hangul, used by many of Korea’s public administrations and the office suite Itchitaro, which is popular in Japan. Open source applications that can handle ODF include OpenOffice, K-Office, Abiword, Gnumeric, Scribus and TextEdit.”
Wishler is our new social wishlist sharing service. Using a bookmarklet, Wishler users can add items from any online store to their wishlists, and share them with friends. Our current site is a beta and we plan to continue adding features and improving the interface with community feedback, so please let me know what you think of the site: www.wishler.com
Thanks.
According to recent reports, the usage share of Firefox, at 45.6%, has surpassed IE (at 44.4%) for the first time, in Germany. “Other” browsers have also reached a record high of 9.5%. See Heise Online for the full story.
Meanwhile, ODF has been selected by Slovakia as its government’s standard data format. Boycott Novell reports this and other news in ODF Wins in Slovakia, Maybe More Countries.
My team recently created a demonstration site to promote Six Apart’s new Motion platform and provide a space for OpenOffice.org community members and fans to share with each other at Share OpenOffice.org.
The site is ideal to quickly post questions, links, and images and to embed videos and spark conversations within the community.
Still to come is custom design work and an ongoing promotional campaign to introduce the site to the broader community of OpenOffice.org and open source fans.