Comment 28 for bug 370034

to mba and all the other developers:
Premise: developers are doing a great work! Thanks!
COmplain: what I see as a big problem in OOo is the fact that "important" avoids
consider daily annoiances and problems users can face. I.e. developers consider
much more important a crash that occurs 1 time over 1.000.000 instead of an
"annoiance" that a user faces every day many times a day.
There are too much exaples of this, unfortunatly. Just I can remember / report
the first ones comes to my mind:
1) this issue ;)
2) the decimal separator of the numeric keyboards in Calc (fixed after too much
time)
3) calc that as default prints ALL the sheets and not the current one (solved
just recentrly, but with problems in the preview page number)
4) writer that did not had (or still has?) the "create single print jobs",a real
night mare if you have double side printer and have to print multiple copies
5) "Deleting newline deletes formatting on subsequent line (when in empty
paragraph)" #50135, was targeted for 2.3 then moved to "2.x"
6) etc. ;)
In short, watching OOo fix around 1.200 bugs / improvements, and have vary
annoying (belive me, I use OOo in my office) that seems (of course, for someone
that is familiar with the huge codebase) "easy to fix" be there since 1.1
version is something that makes you scream "unbelivable".
Also being one that tries to move people from M$crap to OOo, and be ashamed for
some of these "bugs" is really a bad experience. Remember that people that try
to move from M$ don't give OOo many chances, once Calc prints 50 sheets instead
of 1 Excel would have printed, they simply remove OOo. And having me forced to
set tabs and margins in numeric way with a dialog instead of simply drag with
the mouse is something that I fight daily and depresses mee too.
So please, for OOo sake, put users priorities on top of developers one. Btw,
also the "format paintbrush" does not work as expected, developers defending the
behaviour for "tecnical reasons", while users are upset because works not as
expected. Users don't mind about internal rapresentation or the way the code is
build, they follow their mental model, and that's what developers should care
most (see Alan Cooper's books about it, for instance).
Again, the above complain does not mean that I (we) don't apreciate your work,
just I (we) think that priorities should be fixed with another, more "productive
/ user friendly" criteria.