The most resources to develop Muffin was from Google… as they payed the GSoC student to do the work over summer. Other resources were from volunteers to mentor the student and design the thing.
We are experimenting with new UI concepts (1) (2) to make it easier for user to work with the LO as they feel comfortable, but adding new UI options doesn’t mean the old one will be removed. Toolbar / Sidebar will still be available and we don’t plan to remove it.
BTW. you can choose other options already in LibreOffice 5.3, if you enable experimental features.
I know of a few topics out there that cause similar religious fear.
Do all LO users use Base? And if they don’t, do they fear of its presence that much so they would describe it “I hear rumors that the dreadful Base is going to be installed with LibreOffice! Is that true? I’m afraid many people would look for something else because of that, myself included”?
What I expect from a sensible user is a question like “I heard LO is going to have Ribbon. I don’t want to use ribbon, so will it be optional?” This doesn’t make the question, and answer, something polarized.
And the answer to “Will it be optional?” is yes.
To impute “religious fear” to critics and sceptics who well substantiate their point of view should be regarded bad style.
That myself and other critics also talk about some suspicions or a personal attitude you may regard as honest insofar as everyone of us knows he has to expect such accusations.
I personally don’t feel offended but I am stunned by the idea of imputing unobjective and short-sighted thinking to oweng.
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I’m really disappointed that these words are treated as targeted to just anyone you choose, not to the person who asked the question. This answer was the first in the thread, before any other reply was posted, and I never “accused” anyone in comments to (irrelevant!) other answers. Especially it’s unfair to assume that this relates to Owen.
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I do think that the discussion about Muffin being wrong place to put effort reveals fundamental misunderstanding of TDF and LO development.
Personally I don’t like using Ribbon, while reasonably well can use it (e.g. in recent versions of AutoCAD etc.), but I do believe that declaring something as “invented by amateurs”, “riding on a wave”, “spent so many resources” etc (I skip most offensive) when there’s a strong demand of this feature from fellow users, and it is developed by interested developers (there’s no regulation in what to develop in TDF at all!) - is no less “accusation”.
So, I’ll try to describe what makes me think the question is asked incorrectly. First, it states that user was informed about arrival of “Ribbon” to LO (of course, it’s about Muffin). OK, but the second statement is “This is the sad day”, declaring this as a Bad Thing™ right away. This accuses those who developed this feature, as well as demeans those who asked for it. Then, it continues in the same tone, until it asks the real question: is it optional?
The spirit of TDF is co-operation and friendliness. And the long-standing disregard of those of our users who want this feature is not good. Of course, TDF doesn’t force anyone to implement anything, it’s developer who decides that they want to work on this or that. And when a developer decided to satrt working on this, now the users try to create some discrimination, declaring “Ribbon” users second-class. That’s inappropriate.
This doesn’t mean that other fields don’t deserve love, e.g. many bugs, or anything from long list of feature requests you choose. But whatever a developer would choose to work on, there will (and are!) always many users who believe that another thing is more important (to them!), and so the resources are being wasted. That’s bad, and shows egoistic attitude.
So, now I’m declaring that I do disagree with you, and Owen as well. And I do declare that I don’t disregard both of you because of this, just I don’t agree that the tone is right, and that there is a huge misunderstanding. When you say a good argument (that teaching will be harder), I agree, but try to show that at least some other group will get a bonus for that. And users is what we all (devs and teachers) should care of.
@mikekaganski: There were misunderstandings obviously. They may not exclusively have occurred on my side. Anyway I want to apologize if I actually missed the proper tone somewhere. Referring to my poor English is not just an elusion. As I try hard you may miss this fact occasionally.
Anyway I want to state now that I wouldn’t back the suspicion “invented by amateurs”.
With different aspects I best should retire from a discussion here that cannot fruitfully be conducted in an askbot site.
“TDF doesn’t force anyone to implement anything, it’s developer who decides that they want to work on this or that.”
TDF will not have means to force any voluntary developer.to do anything. They also have no means to inhibit any development as long as it is targetting at a private build or at forking off a new brand. They must have a committee deciding about what is allowed to migrate into the official releases branded LibreOffice which surely is a registered and protected trademark.
Such a steering committee will at least also have to decide the case encouragement vs. dicouragement for developers wanting to start off with a big new project in advance.They wouldn’t have any volunteers in development next year if they decided to exclude the results of hundreds of hours of work when already done.
Well, we have ESC (Engineering Steering Committee). It is comprised of leading developers, of course
If you once come to München (Munich) I would be glad to invite you and to have a talk (in a beergarden or somewhere else) with you. Call me or write to me:
Wolfgang Jäger
Thank you very much! I’d be glad, and I invite you to visit Moscow, I’ll be glad to welcome you here!
A dream! Unfortunately my Russian consists of exactly zero words. Moreover I am released in 1944 and regular updating may not be scheduled for a long time to come. However, there wasn’t a muffin added for years now. Removal of rotten parts is rather an ongoing project. Let’s see what the steering committee may decide.
ESC has no objection to Muffin.
I’m of exactly the same mind as you, Mack (OP). That damned ribbon is a disaster of a UI. MS re-designing not because it is an improvement; not because it’s actually useful; but because they need to roll-out a new version of Office and Windows so that they can keep the cash rolling in. Rather than do something useful they just change the eye-candy so that the average Joe thinks, “Gosh. I need that.” Pile of pish!
I’m going to move to a Win 8.1 system because I found out that it was possible to disable the ribbon in Windows Explorer - if it wasn’t possible to do that I wouldn’t switch from Win7. When I need to use MS Office I still use Office 2003 because it’s the last version of Office without that ribbon crap!
If LibreOffice move to a ribbon without being able to have the, completely uncompromised, fully functional proper menus UI then I’ll stick with the last version of LibreOffice that didn’t go down that disaster of a route.
The ribbon is just a change to make a new version of something, just to keep the cash rolling in - nothing more and nothing less.