Splashscreen for OpenOffice.org 2.0 Wanted

An anonymous reader writes "From the OOo site: 'OpenOffice.org 2.0 is coming fast and it needs a new splashscreen. You can help. Send us your best by 10 December and it might be seen on the desktops of tens upon tens of millions next year.' For more information, visit the OpenOffice.org website."

What we need more (from a member of OOo Marketing)

[oldosadmin]

We need you to GIVE OUT CDs to friends.

We need you to DONATE MONEY (paypal button on openoffice.org).

We need you to BE VOCAL in your support of OpenOffice.org.

We need you to say "THANK YOU" to Sun Microsystems for donating all the code and their continual support of OpenOffice.org.


And a few friendly reminders. Open Office(tm) != OpenOffice.org.

And to kill the license trolls, we are LGPL.


(and I may get FP!)

Jason Faulkner

OOo RegiCon North America Webmaster

The ideal OpenOffice.org splashscreen

[KWTm]

Could someone please design a splashscreen that is:

1. transparent, and
2. 2 pixels by 2 pixels? Okay, maybe not that big

Every time I start OpenOffice.org, the huge splashscreen just sits there blocking the way of all my other apps. And it sits there for a LOOOooo...ng time! (Later I discovered that I could drag it out of the way by holding down Alt, but why should I have to?)

Even some translucency would be good so that I can at least see what's going on underneath the splash screen. And someone can design a logo for their new slogan: "OpenOffice.org --now only takes 60 seconds to load!"

Okay, okay, I shouldn't be so hard on the OOo team, since it *is* open-source. Please do take a look at some comments [slashdot.org] that I and other Slashdotters have made which I hope are being addressed. I recognize that some of these take time to work on, but the first step is to know that the items listed above are a significant incentive to switch to a lesser-developed program like AbiWord despite its inferior MSWord-importing capabilities (for example).

UI

[Per Wigren]

Have they got ridden of that weird custom GUI-toolkit in 2.0 yet?
Real native look and feel (not just look) is my major #1 wish for OOo. Especially on OS X it feels extremly alien right now..

Re:UI

[Puggs]

OpenOffice.org is a strange one on OS X...

You have two choices at the moment - OpenOffice.org for X Windows [openoffice.org], the official port, but development is very slow, and recent version(s) do not compile... or, NeoOffice/J [neooffice.org], a port that runs in Java, with the OpenOffice toolkit although this is being worked on to have a native Aqua interface.

In other words, be patient, (or in true OSS-style) join either or both project and start helping ;)

I use NeoOffice/J on my mac - its a little slow, but i prefer it to running X just to use an office app

Just thought I'd let those interested know...

[Roman_(ajvvs)]

... that the splash screen is one of the first things that I turn off when I install a new program and run it for the first time. It really doesn't matter what it looks like to me. It could be the equivalent of Michelango's David and I'd still turn it off.

The primary reason I turn it off, is because I don't want some static, always-on-top window blocking my view of other windows I'm working on. I don't mind programs taking time to load if they need it, just let me read something while it's waiting. In my case, programs rarely get opened up on their own.

Usually splash screens play nice, but they always seems to block something I'm looking at there and then. An about box will suffice if I really find out what I'm running.