The open source community has been left outraged by
Project
Renaissance, a plan by OpenOffice.org to revamp the Open Office
user interface, mimicking the look and feel of Microsoft Office
2010.
One user on
Sun's Open Office blog said: "Why is OpenOffice.org aping
Office 2007's 'Ribbon' design? In addition to being unfamiliar to
most users, it looks terribly out of place on anything except
Windows Vista/7. Will there at least be an option to use an
interface that is, er, usable?"
Another said: "This would be a killer feature for not using
OpenOffice.org don't implement this, do other things - like live
editing in presentation, a correct ttf/otf export or such
things."
Other users complained that the new user interface uses screen
space very inefficiently.
Frank Loehmann, OpenOffice.org user experience project lead user
experience engineer, said: "The prototype is a mid-fidelity one. So
no polished UI. We just want to be able to test the interaction.
Content of the toolbars and the group labelling are subject to
change. They show just what can be done in this prototype. This
allows us to create UX tests that can be run with current
OpenOffice.org and the prototypes."