GUEST POST: Symphony In Blue (And Lots Of Yellow)
This month, IBM released Beta 2 of a re-skinned OpenOffice distribution that Big Blue calls Lotus Symphony (Microsoft Windows, Suse Linux, Red Hat Linux).
As respectable as the functionality of OpenOffice is, the multi-window interface is irksome and the GREY and GREY with a dollop of GREY colour-scheme reminds a user of cinder blocks and ash trays.
Symphony is based on the version 1.x OpenOffice product (OO is currently at version 2.3) and Eclipse. It’s slow to load (“Java”) but once loaded, Symphony performs well enough and offers some usability improvements that make it worth a look. There is COLOUR, tabbed documents instead of multi-window juggling, and a contextual Properties pane for the current document.
What’s perhaps most interesting of all is that you can open a browser window on a tab. Which browser? The component identifies itself on the Web as Internet Explorer version 7 and the rendering characteristics corroborate the claim.
IBM’s marketing is still Teh Suck (see embarrassing attempt at “viral video” marketing. Imagine how well this could have turned out if Apple (or anyone else who understands how to be funny and cool while making a sale) had done it.
At the same time, it’s great for nostalgia that Armonk’s marketing team found a new pretext to get a Lotus logo (even a tiny one) on the Web in the 21st century. What does it all mean for Lotus SmartSuite?
Does someone want to locate SmartSuite’s user community and ask him?
SM: Marko Zarkovic is a senior UX developer
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