OpenOffice, open delusion

I had to. I really didn't want, but I had to use Ms PowerPoint. And I must admit that it doesn't sucks that much. At least no more that OO.o Impress. Or, rather, I've got to say that OO.o is even worse. Much worse.

The group I work for has a default template for presentation. It is soooo ugly. You can't even imagine how ugly it is. So I decided that it would be worth to restyle it a bit.

I wanted to create a double template to be used with OO.o and with MS Office (my boss wants MS, sigh), but it has not been possible. OO.o
Impress lacks of a decent support to Master slides: with MS PP you can at least define many different Master slides (say title slide and regular slide) and apply them to different slides. With OO.o this is not possible: you can define many different Masters, but they are unaware if they are to be used as title or regular slide or whatever. And you simply can't erase any of the default element of the master slide. Basically, you have to hide the mandatory elements (title and body). This is simply how it should not work.

To me it should be more or less like the following:
1. you can create any number of master slide.
2. a master slide can contain any number of elements and you can set any element as input element (let's say that you decide that that text element is the element that will hold the title in the slides, you just set it as a fillable text element and everything works)
3. when you create a new slide, you can base it on a master slide you created before or one among those provided with Impress.

Full stop. Nothing more and nothing less.

What GMail needs

I use GMail since quite long time right now. I think it's almost perfect. It's the only comfortable-to-use webmail.

It groups mails into conversation and thanks to tags it's easy following discussion with people, even easier than using a standard mail application. Much easier.

Frankly I don't know why other mail applications haven't yet introduced the concept of conversation... after all it's not *that* different from the concept of thread.

In order to be almost perfect, GMail should give the user the possibility of ignore a conversation.

I follow a number of mailing lists. Some of them are technical, some others are more political. As in every mailing list, sometimes there are flames.
I rarely am interested in flames, so I'd like to tell GMail I don't want to read a particular conversation anymore.

It become quite annoying when a not-desired conversation keeps poping in your inbox just because someone else just flamed again.