My current projects

I'm gonna start this off by describing my current project of interest.

In the Office Suite market today we pretty much only see two choices: Microsoft Office 2007, the de facto standard in its class, and OpenOffice.org 3.0, which is for all intents and purposes an Open Source clone of Office 2000.

I count myself among the few people who will admit that they actually like Office 2007. It's smooth, reasonably fast, and produces good and useful results. It does, however, continue to be plagued by a sort of 'over-functionality'; There are literally few things that you can't do with Office, and this has made its work flow somewhat convoluted and difficult to manage, for all but the most basic functions. The 2007 release introduced the Ribbon as a replacement for the aging nested menu bar, and this helped significantly, but has not completely alleviated the problem. Moreover, there is no native Linux version available, which is a problem personally for me because I am not even given the choice to use Office on my preferred platform.

I am somewhat less fond of OpenOffice.org. In my experience, it is universally slow and ugly on any platform, its formatting capabilities (beyond the basic) are spectacularly bad, and since it remains a clone of Office 2000 rather than 2007, it is still plagued by the same convoluted work flow that Office always had pre-2007. What's more, although the latest major release (3.0) had a rather large feature list, I can count on probably one hand the number of features that it looks like they took more than a few minutes of code tweaking to implement, and even fewer that I care at all about. Unfortunately, this is what I am stuck with on Linux. Abiword isn't much better.

So I have resolved to attempt to write a substitute myself. I do this for a few reasons; One, I relish the opportunity to practice GUI programming on a large project; Two, I feel that there is a genuine lack of real competition for Office 2007; Three, so that I can have a halfway decent office application on Linux; and Four, so I can try to build up a new, far cleaner work flow from the ground up than the kind that dominates the market today.

I will go into greater detail in future blogs, but for now, I intend for major components of this project to include being both cross-platform and free software, making far greater use of templating and context-sensitivity than existing suites, having a horizontally-oriented layout to make better use of screen space, and in the long run, an ad hoc group editing system to improve collaboration capabilities within an organization.