Usability : User Experience team

In my last post on Usability I was wondering if there was a Usability community in the OpenOffice.org project. I was nicely surprised to find a comment from Lutz Höger. Here is what he answered :

Sun's User Experience team is in transition towards becoming part of or founding an OOo User Experience team. Though there are already some contributions from this area available, like our work in specifications [0], OOo UI guidelines [1], and our work in countless single issues, it still is a long way to go until we can speak of a true OOo UX community. For the time being, our wiki page [2] may serve as a starting point, and you are invited to join us and help us shaping this community. Best regards! Lutz

So if anybody is interrested in helping, I am sure that the User Experience Team will welcome you. PS : Thanks to the User Experience Team for doing such a work.

[0] The specification project

[1] User Interface Guidelines

[2] User Experience Wiki

BasKet 0.6.0 : a software for taking notes

I just wanted to point out that the Basket team just released a new version of its software. Basket is a software for taking notes which has upon many others the qualities of being easy to use, good looking and integrated into Kontact (the KDE PIM). You can get more info about it at the following website :

http://basket.kde.org/

Ready to use Sun's data centers

I love the new marketing compaign for the Sun's blackbox datacenter. Have a look at the following link : http://www.sun.com/emrkt/blackbox/scenarios.jsp

Nice, isn't it.

Usability collaboration in OpenOffice.org

I just read an article by a member of the KDE community on "Usability collaboration in OSS" [0]. In this article he explains the key factors to make the "usability community" of a given project achieve its goals. The goals of such a community are explained by it definition :

"Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal"

From that definition, we can imagine that usability is a key feature of the success of a software, as it is directly related to users. I wonder, do we have in OOo a usability community? That may be useful to achieve the goals of making the software easy to use.

[0] http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2462

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability

OpenOffice.org extensions : deploying templates, autotexts...

During its presentation about extensions [0], Jürgen Schmidt showcased the new extensions related features in OOo 2.0.4. One of those features is being able to deploy "non-code extensions", that means that you can deploy templates, autotext or images in packages. Here is the introduction from the links below [1] :

The OpenOffice.org extension deployment concept based on UNO packages is not limited to code, it also allows to install other things like templates, autotexts etc. in handy packages. Here's a short explanation how this basically works. It is targeted to advanced end users, administrators and development newbies.

[0]the conference : http://ooocon-arnes.kiberpipa.org/media/index-day2-2006.html
[1]the explanations : http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Non-code_extensions

Beta-Blogger & Planet.go-oo : RSS feed required

For those considering to switch to the new beta-blogger, please before doing so, contact martin kretzschmar (martink on IRC). The Atom feed seems not to be well interpreted by planet.go-oo hence martin will change to the RSS feed. You can also have a look at the following post from Ain Vagula : http://vagula.blogspot.com/2006/10/broken-linebreaks-from-blogger-beta.html

"Creating passionate users"

I recently started reading the Katy Sierra's blog following Kai Backman's advice and I have to say that I love it. There you can find books to "make the world better", the "Zombie function" and many interresting posts about users behaviour. Thanks Kai for letting me know it ;-) http://headrush.typepad.com/

New QT 4.2 release

What a great news : Qt 4.2 has been released. As always, this release brings a bunch of brand new features [2]. Check out the what’s new document. The features I love :

• UI with Styles (equivalent to CSS for the web) [0]
• the Graphic View [1]
• Undo Framework (cool to have it already implemented in a generic way)

You can also watch the video with some code demo [3]. Definitly, QT rocks !