Hi Eric, all,
first of all i would like to propose to move any further discussion on
only one mailing list. Maybe [email protected] because the
d...@education is not part of this thread.
eric.bachard wrote:
Hi Juergen,
Juergen Schmidt a écrit :
Martin Hollmichel wrote:
I like and support this idea,
me too and i support the idea as well.
Thank you very much for your support too !
I was a big fan of StarOffice4Kids project
Same for me : Long time ago, I even asked for see the sources, but for
some reasons, I never found them. Long time after, when the need became
obvious for the Eucation Project to provide an Education oriented office
suite, I was very early in contact with Stella Schultze, to discuss with
her about design issues, and some other reasons I don't remin exactly.
And indeed, she suggested to have a look at StarOffice4Kids.
with more or less the same idea.
I agree I "derived" StarOffice4Kids name, to create the OOo4Kids one.
Indeed the idea is similar. I don't know ho wthings where done with
StarOffice4Kids, but we have decided to strictely follow what the
teachers ask (in fact, they must demonstrate every need). Did you the
same ? Can you tell me more about that ?
I can't answer your question i wasn't really involved in the project and
it was done by an external vendor. The colleague who mentored this
project doesn't work for Sun anymore.
Nevertheless, there is at least one big difference : because of the slow
/ poor / old machines most of the schools have, we decided to not use
Java ( StarOffice4Kids is mostly Java if I'm not wrong), but maybe was
it only a prototype ?
yes, probably the better way is to modify the existing user interface...
StarOffice4Kids used the officebean and put an own simplified Java UI
around.
Formally : create a new branch, completely independent of ,
including milestones, like OOo does
what do you mean by completly independent ? I would expect that this
branch should kept in sync with OOo releases ?
Work on the same things should be done on the same code base. For
example Eric talked about performance. Edu performance projects could
be seen as sub projects of the performance project with a special
focus on educational things, maybe driven as university project ...
In my vision of the Education Project working on performance issues,
there are - I'd say - gurus, who do constitute the Performance projects
core. On Education Project side, mentors and students who respectively
teach and learn the good practices, and, for the best of the students,
work on performance improvements. When the idea, and the resulting code
will be enough, we'll join the performance meeting, and propose our work
to be evaluted.
To be frank with you, I have some doubs yet another project/sub-project
will help there (ihmo there is no need to complicate more), but I can be
wrong.
well i don't talk about a real sub project. See it more as virtual
project. One further effort to improve the overall performance under the
umbrella of the performance project. And what is the performance
project. It is one further aspect of the normal and always ongoing
development umbrella.
As i have mentioned earlier i personally don't like our structure with
all the different projects, many of them are useless and are not really
projects. Other are very active and span a much bigger scope.
So i personally work on the OpenOffice.org project in different areas ;-)
The really new stuff from a user perspective is the interaction with
this specific user group kids, the OO users of tomorrow.
Not only : the teachers are involved too. Most of the scheduled changes
have been proposed by them, and without them, nothing would have been
possible (they know better than us what is possible).
that sounds very good and interesting
Other extremely important thing: OOo4Kids is the way to enter in schools
with free software.
yes of course and as i mentioned before, the kids are our users of
tomorrow and they are the business leaders and decision makers of
tomorrow ...
This is from my point of view very important and can be partly
achieved or addressed with a customizable UI.
I think this is not sufficient. We need to implement more than what we
have today, and integrate more Education specific contents and so on.
Believe me or not, but the only thing people want (not only teachers),
is : simplify the UI. On MAc OS X side, this is the rule 20% visible /
80% hidden law.
i haven't said that we have everything in place and i am sure that we
have to do much more. But i see an overlap with the UX team here and
doesn't it make sense to work closer together. Teachers and kids are one
further user group with a different focus as normal office users.
My main point here is if we can find a way to customize our UI in the
way that it becomes quit easy and efficient. We can define different UI
themes for different user groups. One for kids, one for traditional
office users, etc. I don't know if this is possible but it's worse to
think about it.
We should try to work together in all the different areas and not side
by side.
Juergen
I would expect the same code base but customized for the specific
needs of kids. A minimized feature set and a kids related UI etc. A
special branded and customized OpenOffice version if you want.
Yes, something close to that. But new features will be proposed
(starting 2.x)
Anyway it's a very good idea and i will support it where i can.
Thanks again :)
Eric
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]
For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
