August 7, 2009

OpenOffice.org Renaissance

On Twitter, Jochen Wolters points out that OpenOffice.org’s Renaissance project prototype phase1 (which aims to create a new user interface for the word processor) has finished. The somewhat unambitious result is very reminiscent of Microsoft’s Ribbon UI. I guess this is better than OpenOffice.org’s current user interface, but then, there’s not much they could have done that would not have been better than their current user interface. Of course, mimicking Microsoft Office makes it easier for users of that application to switch to OpenOffice.org, so the decision makes some sense.

Personally, I’m all for gutsy, non-traditional user interfaces, so I really liked Andreas Schuderer’s proposal.

  1. I originally mistakenly wrote that the whole project has finished. Only the prototype phase is over, the project is still running. back

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