Short Summary

Petals Office begun as a side project aiming for the development of a more efficient and simpler user interface. It took its name and form slowly, over a long period of time, as a modern approach to an Office suite, which uses an all-in-one tabbed interface that allows to edit text and spreadsheet documents, as well as to display PDFs, side by side. The program will be free, with a commercial version to ensure its future.

Your contribution will make possible the full time development of Petals Office, by two programmers for at least a year, estimating that a first stable version can probably be released by the end of 2014. Furthermore, it will allow for an upgrade of the infrastructure, fees for graphic design and translation to other languages. In case the goal is exceeded by an appropriate amount, additional programmer(s) will be recruited for faster delivery. However, even if the campaign is not fully founded, development of the project will still be continued.

The first version of this suite will include a document and a spreadsheet editor, alongside of a simple PDF viewer. Support for presentations and database capabilities will be added in later versions.

Creating a new suite

Working with various office suites throughout the years, I always felt there was a need for change on their interface. Being forced to change windows from spreadsheet to document editor, is a typical annoyance, even on modern computers where there is enough screen space to display both windows side by side. No matter which type of document you are working on, many of the editing options are difficult to find, hidden on sub menus and dialogs, or are missing altogether on some suites.

The aim of Petals Office is to solve all such problems through a simple adaptive interface, easy to learn and friendly to the user.

Supported Platforms

The platforms which will be supported are Linux, major distributions such as Debian Fedora and openSUSE plus derivatives, Windows, from XP and up, and finally OS X. The suite will have identical features on those operating systems, there will only be slight customization on its appearance. Support for tablets, such as Android, will start after the completion of the first stable desktop version.

The current code is implemented on C++ and Python, using the wxWidgets toolkit. The objective is to create a slick versatile and fast application suite, whilst keeping the look and feel of each OS. ODFpy is used for the manipulation of OpenDocument files. It has been considered releasing it as open source, but such a decision will only be taken with concern for the future of the program.

Design

Since newest computers use wide screens, the toolbar was moved to the side, to take advantage of unused space and free the most useful screen real estate, its height. In comparison the Ribbon toolbar, on the latest Microsoft Office layout, is located at the top of your window at expense of your documents.

Having all office applications in the same interface, through different tabs, helps concentrate all -and on- your work. You can view multiple documents of all supported types (text, spreadsheet, pdf etc) side by side, or in a top bottom split layout. On a 24-inch desktop screen, it is possible to view two full A4 pages side by side, while on editing mode.

It also makes cooperation possible, between what would otherwise be different applications. For example you can insert a table in a document, view it in spreadsheet mode, create and edit a chart and move it back into the document, in no time.

The adaptive foldable toolbar comprises of task specific groups of buttons. This interface resembles that of smart-phones and tablets, and helps users with touch screens do their work faster and easier. The grouping helps you find the task quickly and will also be customizable to the user's needs. The groups and their contents adapt, depending on the type of the document you are focused on, so you always have exactly what you need at your disposal.