Future Project: OpenOffice for Mac
Thoughts
Mac applications in general have been maintaining a pretty good consistency in terms of user interface/experience. In case of Windows or Linux applications, it is not a big of deal to be inconsistent because either there is no concrete guideline that states how applications should look and how they behave, or no one really cares what the guideline suggests. However, in case of Mac applications, it really makes your application distinguishable, usually in a bad way, if you don't follow the guide line. Our popular example would be the OpenOffice application suite.
OpenOffice Writer
I have no doubt that OpenOffice is a great application and I use it on my Linux workstation, but let's face it. It's ugly.
Apple iWork Pages
Yup. I actually paid for this ;-)
What I Want To Do
So, what I want to do is to make a decent user interface for OpenOffice, using the Cocoa framework, to give it a consistent look and feel and common behaviors provided by the Cocoa framework so that it looks like a typical Mac application.
It's going to be a lot of work even though significant amount of code base of the OpenOffice remains unchanged. If you have skills and time, please jump in to this. I won't mind for you to steal my idea. I would love to see what comes out.
October 13th, 2009 - 08:09
I presume you have seen NeoOffice for the Mac?
http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php
October 13th, 2009 - 14:31
I have. But it still doesn’t look like a typical Mac application.
November 1st, 2009 - 03:05
This has been my complaint for years! I don’t like the direction that UI Design is headed. It looks like more and more developers are favoring cross-platform development over developing a truly native application and taking full advantage of the unique features each OS has to offer. Plus, just like what you said earlier about how a non-native Mac application is easily distinguishable from other native Cocoa apps; and most of the time it is an unpleasant change.
If I had more time, it would be awesome to contribute to a project like this because I love Cocoa and I love UI design!