Re: [libreoffice-design] Experimental new LibreOffice UI

Hi Astron;

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 10:11 AM, Stefan Knorr <heinzlesspam@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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..?

The use of Glade is not necessarily significant as it is just a design
time IDE / format.

> (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.)

I think the question is how well GTK+ works on Windows / Mac. Also,
Ohloh shows Gnome losing developers: https://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome so
there are risks to depending too much on them ;-)

> > 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.

A hacker could start with his work if there is no better
There needs to be cooperation on this between the hackers and the designers.

> 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.

I think starting with Writer is a good way to go. Once people "like"
the UI, then it can be extended to the other apps.

> [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.

I think another part of the issue is there is a consensus in
LibreOffice that radical UIs are very difficult, which is true in C++
/ VCL. So there isn't much interest in working on something which will
"never" get implemented. However in Python, much faster prototyping is
possible, and input can be quickly put to use.

Regards,

-Keith

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