__/ [ Mark Kent ] on Friday 30 June 2006 11:02 \__
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> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>> __/ [ Mark Kent ] on Friday 30 June 2006 00:28 \__
>>
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>>> Brad Sims <brad.m.sims@xxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>>>> On Tue, 27 Jun 2006 14:07:45 -0500, Linonut wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I want to look at an Excel or Gnumeric spreadsheet over an ssh
>>>>> connection without having to use VNC.
>>>>
>>>> Ya know I want to do that to but with OpenOffice spreadsheets <g>.
>>>
>>> It would be useful to have a stripped-down version of OO which could
>>> just pull numbers, labels, ranges and formulae from spreadsheets.
>>> Unfortunately, I suspect that sc wouldn't support most of the recently
>>> added formulae, but even having the /results/ would be useful, I
>>> suspect.
>>
>> I still believe that any applications (take YaST for example) should be
>> designed to be accessible in a stripped-down, command-line mode and only
>> then (or in tandem) be extended to have a graphical front-end. That
>> happens to be the approach I took when programming a game whose front-end
>> uses OpenGL. Essentially, returning to YaST2 as an example, the user has a
>> nice fallback, so the requirements bar is lowered and portability is
>> improved. In my case, command-line mode was also a good tool for
>> debugging, improving speed, and dumping game states (rather than variables
>> or screenshots), which proved useful for research purposes.
>>
>> So I guess that my point would be that OpenOffice should get some
>> command-line interfaces as well, whether these are good (functional,
>> usable) or not. They will at least be accessible and in due time improved
>> like emacs, to a greater or lesser extent.
>
> I agree here - one of my biggest personal issues with the design of most
> modern "office" software (except lyx!) is that it is far too monolithic.
> I would far rather have a text-interface into eg,. Abiword, and a
> console-based method of handling all the formatting, so that I could
> concentrate on adding text when I wanted to, and the visual side when
> I wanted to. Same goes for spreadsheets and so on.
You tickled a nerve in your first paragraph. With regards to LyX, which I
regularly use despite my basic knowledge of TeX, _even_ version 1.4 remained
lightweight. This doesn't make /everyone/ happy, but it makes it easy to
use, quick, and less prone to bugs (it rarely ever crashes, having used it
for 5+ years).
On the issue of formats, back in 2003 I was writing a Final Year Project
Report. I was doing this while at work. The boss honoured this, so long as I
responded to customers (largely academic staff). Either way, all I had at
the office was one PC, one iMac, and one Mandrake box (100 MHz-ish, no
Ethernet IIRC). So I ended up working on my document in Windows, before I
became aware of Klaus' unofficial port of LyX to Win32. How did I handle
this? I opened the LyX file in wordpad.exe (as plain text) and then edited
the actual contents directly. Have a look at a Lyx file to convince yourself
that it's rather clean and self-explanatory. It provides a good
abstraction/wrappage to LaTeX, too (although anything could swap the
underlying typesetting blackbox, which happens to be Knuth's).
> One of the great difficulties is that everyone seems to think that the
> desktop PC/terminal is the only access mechanism people are ever going
> to use, but what about little portable things, phones, tablets, all
> kinds of devices as they get smaller - GP2X if they give it bluetooth,
> say? Games machines, bluetooth pen? How about an all-audio interface
> using bluetooth earpiece and some kind of hand-grip?
This fallacy is most detrimental in the WWW.
> Having a CLI-based engine with alternative user interfaces is, to my
> mind, good design, although I'll accept that it's probably much more
> difficult in many respects, I think the results will, in the long run,
> be worth the effort.
>
> That said, I'm unlikely to crack out GCC + Vi and start re-writing
> Abiword... silly me, perhaps!
Intersting prospects nontheless.
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | Bring home the world cup, England!
http://Schestowitz.com | GNU/Linux ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
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