[libreoffice-design] Minutes from the UX/design meeting 2023-Aug-08

Fri Aug 9 19:16:17 UTC 2024

Hello Patrick :-)

Since you replied rather passionately - let me add a few more words.

I love LibreOffice! It's a great endeavor and massively useful suite of
applications, and it's getting better (almost) every day. I try to
convince more people to use it all the time, and wear the T-shirts a lot
to attract more attention to it. And it is our wonderful developers,
designers, and other content contributors - like yourself and like Heiko
- who make this happen.

I also think LibreOffice has all sorts of problems, failures and
deficiencies. Or to put it more bluntly, if you will: LibreOffice
"sucks" in some ways. That's also true for the processes of work on the
project, and for our foundation as well: Some aspects of our collective
conduct "suck" [1]. In fact, in 2010, the people around the project
thought that things sucked so bad that they needed to fork it - and
that's how LibreOffice was born from OpenOffice.

Do you know, Patrick, why I joined the TDF? I actually was reluctant to
do so, because I expected I would get into arguments because of my
tendency to hold strong opinions and try to argue for them (stubbornly,
one might say). So why get into this headache in the first place? In a
project which isn't even one of those I contribute code to?

Well, one reason is that Heiko strongly encouraged me to do it. I can't
speak for him of course, but I'm sure he will tell you that design
meetings are much more lively and interesting, and somewhat more likely
to have useful insights, with participants who have strong intuitions
about aspects of UI and UX; and try to play "devil's advocate" for
less-eloquent bug posters (rather than just pushing my own suggestions).
And you should also note the number of people present in design
meetings: It's someone just two (or two-plus-me); and not all
participants opine on any given issue. So, I guess he thought the
benefits outweigh the detriments, and that other voices with other,
let's say, "organizational personalities" are worth bringing in. I hope
he still thinks so :-)

Another reason has to do with my being from the RTL languages community
[2]. There are very few of us RTL-writers using LO, relative to our
numbers in the world! More importantly, there are extremely few active
users who do RTL-related QA work. And that means, that to express our
collective needs and grievances (to the extent that I can presume to do
so) - it behooves us to be insistent, rather than wait for a bunch of
other people to eventually, someday, make the same complaint and carry
the argument. So expect insistence and push-back on RTL-related issues
from me, in the future as well, and - in good faith. I also hope I'm
offering an RTL-language-minded perspective as a trustee as well.

Eyal

PS - If you think I complain about everything than you have no idea of
how many more things there are to complain about :-P

[1] : And I don't mean the auditors' findings last year; although that's
one criterion we could use.
[2] : Admittedly, a particularly over-privileged part of that community.
What's happening in Gaza is a terrible crime against all of humanity,
and I'm trying to challenge it in the public sphere by helping to
organize demonstrations, that get repeatedly suppressed by the Israeli
police.

On 09/08/2024 5:19, Patrick Luby wrote:
> Hi Eyal,
>
> I was wondering when you would turn your focus to the developer list. I have been watching your posts on the board discussion mailing list and, frankly, I still have no idea what you do except complain about literally everything.
>
> Look man, I’ve been working with the LibreOffice (and its predecessor  OpenOffice) for 20+ years and I’ve seen a parade of pushy people like you swoop in, tell us we all suck, and then demand we all conform to your wishes. To quote Michael Meeks, you are good at identifying problems but very poor at resolving any of them.
>
> There are a thousand or more things I’d like to improve. But here’s the deal:  TDF doesn’t actually have any developers. Heiko doesn’t have an army of developers waiting for your insight. He relies on volunteers like me to figure out what can change without pissing users off. Problem is that volunteers like me don’t really like dealing wth overbearing people like you.
>
> I admire Heiko’s patience and professionalism. He’s in a difficult spot with zero funding. I get it, shouting and belittling TDF staff is your way of trying t get people to do what you want. But, like most users, you provide absolutely nothing to hire the staff that you really want. I for one have decided that I just don’t like you and will ensure that I never work on your wants in the future.
>
> Patrick
>
>> On Aug 8, 2024, at 5:42 PM, Eyal Rozenberg <eyalroz1 at gmx.com> wrote:
>>
>> Come on, Heiko and Cor! Another example of not giving proper attention
>> to the discussion on the bug page.
>>
>> On 08/08/2024 16:36, Heiko Tietze wrote:
>>>   * "Text direction" in page style dialog, with both Asian and RTL-CTL,
>>>      is inconsistent and confusing
>>
>> you left out a key part of the title: "doesn't always set the actual
>> direction".
>>
>>>      + https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162200
>>>      + agree with Regina on keep status but write better help (Cor)
>>>      => WF
>>>   * Table > Properties > Text Flow > Text Orientation is misphrased and
>>> confusing
>>>     + https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162201
>>>     + better "writing mode" (Regina)
>>>   => follow the expert's advice
>>
>> First, let us return to a point that I thought was already settled:
>> Changes to help/documentation text are not a solution for problems with
>> the LibreOffice UI. If a control or a label is confusing or
>> inconsistent, that needs to be improved in the app itself, as best we
>> can; and whatever the UI has - the documentation is for elaboration in
>> greater detail, with more context and examples.
>>
>> Second, we're past confusion or poor wording: We have "Text Direction"
>> control, which, for vertical writing modes - does not set the text
>> direction (!) and - there isn't another control in the dialog which sets
>> it, either. (For horizontal writing modes, the control does set the
>> direction.)
>>
>> Finally - there are concrete suggestions for some improvements, and
>> they are not even all dependent on each other. The design meeting
>> minutes do not list any argument regarding why any of them are a bad
>> idea (and Regina's comments do not argue against these suggestions either).
>>
>> Let me rephrase the suggested changes briefly, here:
>>
>> * Split off writing mode control from direction control, using
>> consistent and clearly-phrased labels.
>>
>> * Improve the preview graph to illustrate how lines look and progress.
>>
>>
>> Eyal
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>   * STYLES pane -- duplicate style (an additional option beside the
>>> existing
>>>     new style from selection
>>>     + https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162209
>>>     + WF'ed before on bug 152189
>>>     + duplication would be like new but on the same level in the hierarchy,
>>>       support the request (Cor)
>>>     => do it
>>>
>>>   * Terrible usability of AutoText dialog when creating new AutoText
>>>     + https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52607
>>>     + Source > Clipboard (added newly) should not be done as the AT
>>>       needs to be verified in the context (Cor)
>>>     + preview window: zoom slider for preview (Gerry)
>>>       + disagree; the actual issue should be fixed (Heiko)
>>>     + AutoText dialog should be amodal
>>>       + agreed (Cor, Heiko)
>>>     + does it make sense to modify the category while creating a new AT
>>> (Cor)
>>>       + we should carefully avoid mixing individual attributes from one AT
>>>         with information on the list of ATs such as categories and path;
>>>         therefore these are split out of the AT dialog/s (Heiko)
>>>     + is "Create AutoText out of selection" (directly) possible? (Gerry)
>>>       + requires a category and unless we just add all new content to
>>>         some "Standard" it needs this selection first (Heiko)
>>>     => wait for volunteers to implement
>>>
>
>