[buovjaga]

> Tell me LibreOffice isn't a MASSIVE project with thousands of man-hours invested in developing its under-the-hood features. How about finally recognizing UX design as a vital part of that effort? Or rather, its biggest flaw?

Please don't misrepresent something you have not studied. UX is absolutely recognized as vital in LibreOffice. The point is, companies invest in development commissioned by their clients. So far there has been no client wanting to spearhead massive under-the-hood improvements to the UI system (yes, this would be very relevant to further work). The work done is incremental and admittedly not advancing quickly enough.

Volunteer UX/UI designers getting involved in open source is still a new thing, so the size of the UX team has mostly just stayed constant from the OpenOffice.org days.

[agentdrtran]

> UX is absolutely recognized as vital in LibreOffice

you can really tell by the amount of effort they put into it.

[cesarb]

Yes, and a lot of it was painstaking backend work. OpenOffice has its own cross-platform widget toolkit, which nobody else uses, and a lot of work in LibreOffice has gone to cleaning up that ancient code. For instance, all dialog boxes had hardcoded sizes and positions; each one was manually converted to a flexible layout in the Glade .ui format, and a backend was written to load these files and instantiate the corresponding widgets. Now that this conversion is mostly finished, it's become easier to modify the interface. But there's still work to be done.

[collyw]

I rarely use MS Office or LibreOffice, but I find it easier to locate stuff in the menus of LibreOffice.