On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

Although this is not currently released until September 2008, I have been working with the latest working version of the upcoming OpenOffice.org 3.0 release.

So far my work has been squarely in Writer (the word processing component) which I have grown to really like over the past year. While some of its interface is a little sprawling in places, it can’t be accused of lacking features. I also happen to think that it works a lot better than Word. Two areas where Word always manages to drive me up the wall is complicated numbered lists and documents of any length with sections. It can get messy and frustrating when the section break doesn’t do as intended and often enough these problems are fixed by diving into Normal mode.

However Writer in its 3.0 iteration is looking very good. It has much improved note/reviewing features, a nice tidy zoom control in the lower right (clearly from MS Office 2007) and also supports multiple pages in the view when editing which I have never found a need for but that might be more in part due to me not owning a widescreen monitor or laptop. I could see some merit in two pages per view on a 1680 by 1050 widescreen display. However, on a 4:3 aspect screen at resolutions of 1280 by 960 or lower, it’s too small to look at comfortably.

The icons have also been a given a subtle touch up and they look nice.

I think OpenOffice.org has a bit of a dilemma here. It’s clearly become a very powerful alternative to Microsoft Office and I do genuinely feel that for the majority of uses in the enterprise or corporate environment would be served by OpenOffice.org very well; especially as its interface is much closer to pre-Office 2007 Microsoft Office products than 2007 is. The only exceptions are people with legacy Microsoft Access databases (which do get around a fair bit still), Powerpoint 2007 and very complicated and deeply workflow entrenched Excel spreadsheets.

The Access databases speak for themselves as they are often entwined in Visual Basic for Applications code and use a bunch of forms that are in the database itself. These don’t lend themselves for OpenOffice.org Base usage, but it’s not impossible for this situation to change if Microsoft does indeed drop VBA with the next release of Office for Windows, over time a replacement will need to be found. Invariably these databases tend to be small affairs on a desktop as most databases that are critical to an organisation’s functioning should now at least be on a dedicated database engine such as SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL etc. which is far in advanced of the scalability and reliability of Jet.

The second is Powerpoint. Up until 2007, it was a decidedly tired looking affair with naff slide styles, terrible clipart and it was a feature of dread in any meeting when someone beamed up their Powerpoint slideshow which could have been just as easily created on Powerpoint 4.0 from 1993. At least 2007 improved this by getting cool slide styles, excellent drawing functionality and generally it is harder to make a bad looking presentation now than before, although the Comic Sans risk always lurks in every company… Impress however whilst alright, isn’t that impressive. Generally the slide effects are very Powerpoint 4 and whilst OpenOffice.org 2.4 addressed this to a degree, there is always a chance that even a decent 128MB dedicated video card will grind to a halt doing a simple slide in transition. This has always been a huge problem with me adopting Impress as it is inexcusable. Even my old 14MHz Amiga 1200 15 years ago with Scala MM200 could exact smoother transitions. Sort it out, please. On top of this, Impress has for as long as I recall, has come with the crappest presentation templates in the world. They suck, all two of them. Sure you can install more and then have something great looking. However most users do not do this. After all, why have Powerpoint presentations looked the same since the dawn of time even when Microsoft offered templates to download. Please for the love of god sort this out for 3.0.

One good thing however that I hope is replicated into Writer and Calc is the table styles which give a nice professional look that Office 2007 offers to tables.

Finally Excel isn’t something I know a lot about but it’s clear that some organisations have Excel spreadsheets deeply embedded in the workflows they work with and a simple straight swap may not be just that. However for the majority of statistical analysis and chart functionality, Calc is great.

Essentially I am impressed with the quality of the current OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta and more is to come such as improved Office 2007 (OXML — formerly OOXML) import/export and other bits I am sure I have missed. However, it does strike me that many more companies shell out for Office licenses when probably 70-80% of their workforce doesn’t need all the functionality Office 2007 provides.

It’s even more mind boggling that a seven year old child would need Microsoft Word? Even Wordpad surely suffices for what they want most of the time. After all, us lot from the early 90s didn’t have this at all until 1993 when the Acorn Archimedes computers most schools had (a legacy of the BBC Micro programme) started getting a word processor called PenDown. It didn’t do masses but it was good enough. I do really think that so much money could be saved in education with suites like OpenOffice.org. Government is another good example.

This of course doesn’t detract from the fact that on the whole the MS Office ecosystem is great and has done a lot for the office but I am struggling to think why most people need Word when really they are using it as a glorified Wordpad application with most documents I see, no usage of styles or anything.

So what does OpenOffice.org 3.0 really need in my book to really sharpen its game?

• Some decent default slide templates for Impress. The current ones are bloody awful. Sorry guys.
• Tighten the interface up, try to introduce a bit more space in things, let the dialogs/windows breathe a bit more. There’s a lot of functionality, so don’t let that get hidden. I’m not suggesting a ribbon interface.
• Enhance Writer’s default styles to have nice suave styles like Word 2007 has with its nice colour schemes too

Perhaps also a leaf out of Firefox 3’s book is needed, skin the application to look more comfortable on the target systems. E.g. Luna style for XP, Aero Glass style for Vista, Aqua/Leopard style for OS X, GTK/QT look for Linux distributions. Sadly we live in a world where most people look at appearances first and that will often win them over rather than whether something is actually better. I’m currently using Live Writer (a Microsoft product) which looks great. Invest some time on aesthetics please.

Otherwise though, this is shaping up to be a good release. Let’s hope it becomes a fantastic release.

I won’t go into this one in a big way as I’m still taking it in. That said, as much as I openly put my foot down to outright Microsoft bashing (and there is a lot of it) they also manage to come up with just as much baloney sometimes.

Recently Stephen Shankland over at CNET News enquired with a certain Clint Patterson to what extent it embraced competition from say Thunderbird (an email client) and also to assisting the developers with Exchange server support.

The open-source development model has yet to demonstrate the ability to support profitable software businesses that can drive the coordinated research and testing necessary to sustain innovation…

On the face of it that’s a fairly sensible comment if you purely look at things from the perspective that research and innovation can only occur with financial inputs. Notice also the clever drop in of ‘coordinated’ in that sentence to suggest that open-source projects lack co-ordination. In some sense that has certainly been true, but it’s now not quite the case as the Ubuntu project shows that the effectiveness of open source collaboration and coordination is no longer the disaster zone it once was.

Ok so on what grounds am I arguing against Mr. Patterson? I think it’s related to what I wrote last night; that there are many other forces behind the innovation on the web front nowadays, more than anything: passion. And maybe ‘profit’ looking at it from the word’s etymology is not just about a financial profit, but a profit of goodwill, support, emerging community, openness, user directed control.

And is support purely a carrot dangling on the end of the string? Or rather ponying up the dough (money up front) to get people to work on such things. No. What open source does very well is foster innovation by people who have a genuine passion to hack away into the night as it were, and do it just for the love of it. Apart from a ego massage, what other incentive do open source developers have? It has to be their passion for creating the wonderful software that they do.

If anything web development is partially open source because whilst it’s an unspoken truth to say that our designs may sometimes pass a resemblance to something we saw elsewhere and liked a lot–that is what happens. That’s design and art forms. Having influences that guide us to the next stage. Coders may peek into the source to look at various techniques and whilst Ctrl + C is not the solution so to speak (that’s copy, not break!) but we are influenced by the implementation. Even reading people’s websites, blogs and forum comments on how to solve a bloody Internet Explorer 6 layout issue is an open form of collaboration; we aren’t downloading proprietary binary objects to solve the problem; we are sharing the solutions and ideas in geek readable form!

Is this not in effect an open source model? Whilst I’m not saying we should now go and create a direct copy of say Flickr, some users may already be thinking, I wish it did this and that, and they’ll probably go and do it and be influenced by Flickr but they won’t necessarily leech the code; various parts of the process (design, code prototyping, implementation etc.) will be influenced by what has gone before. It’s an art form, and the creative person will have their influences and then chuck it in a pot, mix it up and have something that’s their own. It’s like my writing: my big influences include Jack Kerouac, JG Ballard and Will Self; but I’m not writing books exactly how Kerouac would. I’m not copying his words. They’re at the back of my mind when I write, as are the influences I get from everywhere. Web design is the same, be it code or visual–it has influences that whether it’s for a public, private or open entity–the same work practice has gone into it.

Can you honestly say that you have written a piece of code that hasn’t had even a minor influence in implementation or reason of coding it in the first place? (e.g. x didn’t work so I decided to start on this: y; to the solve the problem.) Can you say you sat in a dark room for a year and then designed a website (appearance) that had no influences at all but only your own concoction? Probably not. In fact as a writer I like identifying the prose that has influences from my favourite authors: like I say might call a certain sentence very Kerouac inspired (’Go cry…’) or perhaps Will Self (I was impressed with the writing on the A41(M) and the mention of Lutyens… yes I know this shit man! It made it OK to write about Owen Williams’ bridges of the future–that’s the original 1959 bridges on the M1, OK?…) etc.

Maybe the web developer should be able to say, my design is influenced by the aesthetic of Flickr, the usability of Google based applications (which always have an aesthetic of their own)–and so forth.

So to wrap up, where does this leave Mr. Patterson’s statement? The point is that profit isn’t just about financial gains, there are profits from open source that we can all benefit from. Profits such as fostering the ability to contribute, be in control and do something yourself in the vein of your influences to communicate what you want to. Innovation sometimes seems to be seen as copying features from Windows, or Mac OS X and any other direction within that and some of it will. Apple did with what they saw at Xerox and Microsoft inevitably did with what they saw from Apple. But it’s putting your own spin on it. Can Flickr be called a bootleg or copy of what Yahoo! Photos was? No, it does the same thing but with its own spin on it. Operating systems do the same. Innovation will always sprout so long as someone has the ability to think, the ability to do it, the will to communicate and the passion to drive them there–regardless of the financial incentive to do so.

For this reason, I believe Mr. Patterson’s statement on the front of it is reasonable if a slightly dated view, and a very close minded view of what is needed to drive innovation. After all, I don’t remember there being any financial incentive when fire was ‘invented’?

Think outside of the box there are many other reasons aside from money. I’m not saying open source will beat Microsoft one day, maybe it will, maybe it won’t? Does it matter? The point is that the success of the web over the past ten years proves that open collaborative environments can foster innovation and do so incredibly successfully without precluding the financial gains that may come from it, but neither is it a prerequisite in my view. I.e. I could create something fantastic website and advertise and promote it for free (bar my ADSL monthly fee) and it might just gain traction. After all, it’s not exactly big well known brands and corporations behind some of the Web ‘2.0′ successes; though eventually they do become them themselves.

The web has levelled the playing field of opportunity. Maybe Open Source will do the same for the computer’s local environment; and maybe with the playing field levelled, that is what Microsoft is having a harder time of getting their heads around and how to leverage it for their business model.