Why I like Symphony 3 (Beta 2)

Anthony Holmes  6 February 2010 05:49:20 PM

As somebody who works for IBM, I've almost entirely stopped using MS Office. However I've been flipping between Symphony 1.x, OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice for a while, and not entirely settled on any of them. Company loyalty to IBM meant that I'd often use Symphony, especially when working on presentations and documents that I was going to share with other IBMers. But for some work an most personal use I've generally used Open Office 3.

After a couple of days using IBM Lotus Symphony 3 (Beta 2), I'm developing confidence that this is likely to become my preferred Office product. Here's why:

My key feature: Text documents can now be displayed with two (or more) pages shown side by side:


This feature has existed for some time in OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice, so Symphony isn't doing anything new here. But I've got a large, wide, high resolution screen. Being able to see the flow of my documents is important to me. Until Symphony obtained this feature I was always likely to be unhappy using it as a word processor. This was the first thing I looked at when I installed Symphony 3, and I was very happy to see that it is now available.

Sidebar

In addition, there's something in Symphony that I think make it even better than OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice. Specifically, I'm thinking about the Sidebar controls. These provide a unified interface for functions that are done with three different interfaces in Open Office. (Toolbars, dialogs and a funny non-standard pane.)

The Sidebars follow the convention used in the Lotus Notes 8.x interface of placing some items in a peripheral vision location. Things that you will need occasionally sit off to the edge. I believe that this has been developed as a result of usability testing.

Changing Text properties is handled two different ways in Open Office:

• Toolbar icons (which are squashed into a narrow line, instead of being laid out in the more usable format used by Symphony's Text Properties control) or
• With a Modal Text Properties Dialog (where you need to select your Text/Paragraph etc., bring up the Modal Dialog, and then make your changes before pressing OK. A tedious and distracting approach.)

For those who like Toolbars and Modal Text Dialogs, these still exist in Symphony. But with the wide screens that are becoming the norm these days, the Symphony Sidebar approach works well. There is a nicely laid out set of controls on the right hand side (that can be opened or compressed). It has layout space that make it simpler to find things (like the Modal Text Properties Dialog), but unlike the Text Properties Dialog, you're not forced to press OK in order to go back to editing your document: you can switch quickly between editing your text and changing properties. (**See the bottom for why I don't like modal dialogs).

In Open Office, Clip Art becomes visible when you select Tools; Gallery. This then opens a window stuck between your toolbars and your document that doesn't look like anything else you see in the interface. (This is the "funny non-standard pane" I mentioned above.) It's a bit obscure to know where to turn it on (it's not in the Edit, Format or Insert menus), and when it is turned on it's inconsistently placed. By contrast it's easy to see where to turn on the Symphony Clip Art, and when it is enabled it appears in the same place as the other Sidebar controls:



The other two default Sidebar controls are Styles and Navigator. In Open Office these open as (thankfully non-modal) floating windows. If that's what you prefer, you can also drag them away from the Sidebar in Symphony and they turn into floating windows. But the down side of floating windows is that they are quite likely to obscure the text you are trying to edit. That is counter productive. In Open Office they can't be docked. I prefer the Symphony approach of having a consistent place on the edge for them to sit that doesn't obscure text.

**Why I don't like Modal Dialog Boxes

As Wikipedia describes it, "Non-modal or Modeless dialog boxes are used when the requested information is not essential to continue, and so the window can be left open while work continues elsewhere". Formatting text is a classic case where non-modal dialogs simply make sense.

For those who haven't seen it, this is the non-modal Text Properties in Lotus Notes: it lets you easily assign text properties without having to switch modes (and press OK) all the time. Tabbed Windows and Tags (originally called Categories in Notes) were features that Notes pioneered that eventually stormed the rest of the PC interface world. Non-modal dialogs already exist in some software, but I hope that they will become more popular.

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