Re: [libreoffice-design] Question about UI plans

Hi Alex, all,

Alex B schrieb:
> I just asked myself, if there are any plans for a new UI?

In addition to Christoph's reply:
Many people are interested in improving the UI - your comment below 
describes part of their work.

> I saw
> several really good mockups over the past view months, but i found
> nothing tangible in the wiki. There are several small proposals and
> improvements wich could be get discarded if a new UI is implemented.

But like Christoph mentioned:
A general UI overhaul will not only have advantages.

Main point is: We need developers to work on such a major modification - 
and they need lot of time and dedication to struggle their way through 
the code. With a paid staff, this would probably work quite well, but 
based on the volunteer status of our developers I would propose a 
different approach:

1) split the design mockups in bits and pieces (and find out that some 
of these bits are part of several mockups)

2) define the improvements we would like to be implemented first.
In my eyes this is docking/undocking behavior for windows and  toolbars 
(including menus): With such a feature most of the different opinions on 
context sensitive menus would be handled quite easily by extensions for 
different target groups.

3) find developers to work on these features (as these are just single 
areas, the coding effort should be much less than on a general new design).

4) ship LibreOffice with improved UI with (nearly) every new version - 
leading to the general overhaul in quite the same time as a 
one-step-solution (or even faster, if the other way would lack 
developers) and allowing our present users to get accustomed to the 
improvements.

5) work on improving LibreOffice's theme handling and design extension 
handling in a parallel action - this would allow to create different UIs 
for different purposes, if someone would code such an extensions.
> So are there any designers/programmers out there actually working on
> a new UI?

I already started with point 1 on a dedicated wiki page:
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/UI_Elements

Feel free to improve my example element ("vertical tabs") by pointing to 
the different mockups containing such an element, adding an image or 
including your comment - but you can add your proposals and ideas too!

If you pr somebody else would volunteer to have an eye on the evolution 
of this page and the action based on it, this would be great!

Best regards

Bernhard


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