KOffice reveals GUI design contest winner

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Mar. 06, 2006

KOffice announced Monday that developer Martin Pfeiffer of Germany has won its first GUI and Functionality Design Competition for KOffice 2.0. Pfeiffer was cited by the KOffice jury for his "thorough and innovative rethinking of the entire process of creating and working with documents and tools," the team said on its website.

The contest -- the first KOffice has presented -- opened on Dec. 22 and ended Feb. 15, judge Boudewijn Rempt told DesktopLinux.com via email. Eighteen entries from 15 developers made up the field, Rempt added. The purpose was "to generate new ideas for KOffice 2.0 -- ideas that leave the familiar Office track and try to find new and improved ways of working. We really did succeed here; we got a lot of very cool and innovative ideas," Rempt said.

Martin Pfeiffer's winning entry
(Click to enlarge)
Regarding the winning entry, the team stated, "Martin Pfeiffer, our winner, has gone back right to the roots of the problem and has started with the question 'what is it we're trying to do, actually.' Working from that principle, he arrives at an interesting, innovative workflow-based solution that is both ambitious and takes the human factor into account. The idea of "patterns" to style parts of documents is very interesting. Added to that, there are a number of larger and smaller suggestions for improvement."

Brief descriptions of all the entries are published on the Koffice Project's website, here.

Manik Chand Patnaik was selected for the runner-up award for his "meticulous analysis of the way office software could work better," the team said. Dennis Pennekamp was given an honorable mention for his "innovative and fun proposal to use Krita and KPresenter together to podcast comics -- which was only one of his many really innovative ideas," the team added.

Trends apparent

The team said that some general trends were clear across the entries -- a palette-based interface was a recurring theme, for example.

"That's something we've seen before in the Adobe applications or on NeXTStep, but not generally applied to Office software," the team said. "Something to be considered for KOffice 2.0! Not all suggestions were entirely practical or even feasible, but that was exactly the intention of this competition: to break through the familiar mold and get fresh ideas."

The judges were Rempt, the maintainer of Krita (the KOffice paint application) and the release manager for 1.5; and Inge Wallin, maintainer of the charting component and the promotions officer for KOffice.

The judges were pleased to receive a large number of "high-quality, innovative and fun entries," the team said. Entries varied from rethinking the entire work flow for office workers to a careful analysis of the weak points of the current general practice, with "wonderful and weird ideas on the text-entry process in between. It turns out that it is possible to find new directions for office software," the team said.

"The decision (to select the winners) was quite hard, but in the end the jury was in complete agreement," the team said. "All submitters have reason to be proud of their work ... We wish to commend those people whose native language is not English for their courage. They labored under the additional handicap of a sometimes unfamiliar language and still managed to present their ideas."

All entries are now available under the GPL.

You can download the latest stable version of KOffice (1.4.2) here.

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