OpenOffice.org Dashboard Concept
For the past few weeks I’ve been developing an idea to extend OpenOffice.org 3.0’s Welcome Screen into a more complete Dashboard concept. The idea sprung from Google Chrome‘s new tab screen, Spicebird‘s Home screen, and the social software ideas being developed as KDE’s Open Collaboration Services.
Yesterday I uploaded (well, Alexandro did it for me) a mockup to the OOo Wiki in order to share my OpenOffice.org Dashboard concept for further discussion. I have some plans to improve the current mockup, and will attach an ODG to the page to make it easier for others to illustrate ideas to build on top of what I have started.
If you’re interested, please check out the page and provide some feedback.
I think this Dashboard idea fits well with our plans to make OpenOffice feel more modern, configurable, and social, so let’s see what the community can do with this!
November 20th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Welcome Screen is very nice candy feature in new OpenOffice.org, and it should be possible to extend it it future.
For example it would be nice to integrate timeline widget showing recent documents, showing groups of documents that were used together or have an extension that adds time tracking features.
But we need to make sure that these are helping users getting things done. What is good for web browser does not have to be good for office suite.
And tabs? are you serious about tabs? 🙂
In web browsers it is common to have 20+ tabs open and usually you want to browse only one web page at a time. But in office suite, I often tile windows so I can see my spreadsheet and text document at the same time. Isn’t it better and feature complete to do this from a window manager than having multiple windows inside OOo.
November 24th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
I agree with you that something doesn’t necessarily work for OOo just because it works in the browser. On the other hand, I think there is a logical amount of convergence in features and user interface that we should pursue, because it will be helpful to end users, especially now, when many people are seeing every other program in relation to the browser.
Yes, I think tabs would be really helpful too. Lots of folks find tiling windows to be surprisingly difficult, and other times tabs just save space on a cramped monitor. In fact, Lotus Symphony, based on the OOo codebase, has implemented tabs and it works well.
You would not be forced to use them, just like you aren’t forced to use them in Firefox, but for the times you want them, they’re right there.