Re: [libreoffice-design] Re: The Sidebar Problem

After reading the last previous posts, especially the ones by Teo91 it's
quite easy to recognize that indeed there's a lack of LO developer interest
in coding UI improvements. Which is a shame since LO is one of the
open-source projects with more involved devs.

Nevertheless, I think that that issue is due to the fact that untill
recently the devs had to focus on improving the quality of the code,
porting the dialogs to GTK3, etc - including the Sidebar.
Instead of discussing about axing the Sidebar and cutting down UI options
and affecting the workflow of people who came to rely on it (when I use LO
I use the Sidebar so it would affect me).

Right now, after all the work that has been done on LO, it is the proper
time for the design team to try to increase the interest of devs in
improving the UI, something that has been discouraged untill now because
there were so many other things higher on the priority list. However, many
of those items higher on the priority list have been solved so reflecting
and coding UI improvements is a reasonable prospect.

There's no lack of interest on improving the UI as you can see by the
numerous UI mock-ups for LO in DeviantArt. However, usually those are too
radical.

What the team here could focus on is:
- Coming up with UI mock-ups and ideas on how to improve the Sidebar
(Daniel Hulse ideas are great),
- Show those ideas to a few developers to pique their interest,
- Spread the word around that work in improving the Sidebar is taking place
and that there's interest in drawing in devs to work on UI improvements in
LO through Google+, blogs, etc,
- Maybe hint that there would be a new default UI based on the work done by
the LO dev community instead of relying on the recycled look of Open Offic
​e. Why isn't the work done by the LO devs and team being used as the
default when it comes to the UI? Wouldn't the design team be proud if code
based on your mock-ups would be the default of LO (ex. why isn't the Sifr
icon set the default LO icon set)?​


​However, don't think that I am promoting radical changes in workflow. I am
not. I am talking about improving on what's already available on LO right
now - the Sidebar - and turning it on by default in all the components of
LO. But also keeping the toolbars as an option to the people that don't
feel the need to better use the horizontal space of their displays instead
of the vertical.


On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 5:02 PM, Rodolfo <rodolforg@gmail.com> wrote:

> Teo,
>
> They are/were not converting the dialogs to GTK+ toolkit. They are
> just using the Glade dialog layout file format to easier mantainance
> and layout edition. =) They will still, AFAIK, stick into VCL, as it
> can have backends of differents
> widgets toolkit in order to appear native dialogs.
>
> Regards.
>
> 2014-05-01 6:29 GMT-03:00 Teo91 <mcavalleri91@gmail.com>:
> > No more, not in the upcoming future:
> > https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/WidgetLayout/FindDialogs
> > Over 84% of current dialogs have been converted to the new .ui format who
> > rely on GTK+3 toolkit.
> > When complete, the plans are (as far as I know):
> > --snip--<
> > - finally port main windows to GTK+3
> > --snip--<
> > The good news is that the sidebar is indeed a dialog docked on the side
> and
> > already converted to GTK since LO 4.2
>
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