Re: [libreoffice-design] Experimental new LibreOffice UI

Hi Keith,

> Furthermore, maybe WxWidgets might make sense to one day (slowly)
> LibreOffice's internal toolkit. VCL is very rich, but in an ideal

So first of all, VCL is sadly not too rich – everywhere you see anything
more fancy than a button, tab or tick box it is some sort of custom
widget. Also, it lacks some things that continue to grow in importance
as we move towards generally smoother computing experiences – an
animation framework and better platform integration for instance.

Next: I guess the long-term plan is to move LibreOffice to(wards) GTK+,
I don't really know for sure though. But the adoption of Glade files for
our UI seems to be an indicator. (Of course, I am sure it's possible to
write a parser for the Glade format that works with WxWidgets, as it was
possible to write a parser for VCL.)
Anyway, maybe Samuel is indeed right about PyGobject being the better
idea..?

(From my end-user-only experience, GTK+ seems to be the better-
developed, more mainstream toolkit, too. But I may be using the wrong
applications.)


> The big question for here is: what is the best design as a starting
> point? If no one has any better bitmaps, it seems likely it will start
> based on Paulo Jose's work, but he isn't a part of the LibreOffice
> design team.

So, Paulo José used to be part of the design team but he hasn't been
here in the past two years. Thus, you would be very lucky to get him to
provide any feedback at all – you can always try though.
Also note that what Paulo has provided is basically a _single_ mockup of
a single component, so I somewhat doubt that it is straightforward to
implement.

At the same time, I think there is not much support for his mockup ideas
– our [1] current line of thinking is that our current toolbars are not
all bad, just unwieldy, often uncontextual and not really ready for
touch input [2].

So, one item that I'd personally love to see tried with toolbars is
displaying floating, highly-contextual toolbars that only appear when an
element is selected, Gnome-Notes style [3].
  * Can we fit everything necessary in such a bubble?
  * Can we get it to the point where it is enjoyable instead of
    annoying?
Obviously, you'll hear different opinions on whether this is useful or
not... but if I could wish for something...

Astron.


[1] Just to make it clear, this "our" is not necessarily meant to
    represent everyone on this list. We haven't really tried finding a
    consensus, because working on toolbars used to be mostly a time-
    waster project, I guess.

[2] cf.
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Gsoc/Ideas#Improve_toolbars_in_LibreOffice
    Note though, the description is very generic at the moment.

[3]
https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/notes/notes-single.png


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