Re: Android design?

Hi Mirek,

On Sat, 2012-02-04 at 23:11 +0100, Mirek M. wrote:
> A few questions from a design team member:

        Shoot ! :-)

> I'm assuming the LibreOffice Android port will sport a UI different
> from its desktop counterpart, without menus or dialogs and with a
> simple file manager (as is the standard for Android productivity
> apps).

        I hope so; file-manager-wise we have lots of the type detection, icon
goodness etc. inside the soffice core, but of course VCL is horrendously
unpleasant to look at - so perhaps some set of tweaks to the existing
file-selector (which is already being improved in various ways for CMIS
integration IIRC) would be useful for that specific piece.

>  When will development on this UI begin? How will the developer and
> design teams cooperate? Should the design team get started on a UI
> proposal now, to speed up the process? What restraints will there be
> on the design? Which features are getting ported over and which ones
> aren't?

        There is a lot to do of course; and virtually none of these issues have
been settled. There is no defined feature set, very little code, it's a
prototype ;-)

        Now - of course, collecting UI ideas, doing competitive review,
building pretty splash-screen artwork [ I suspect we may be somewhat
slow to start ;-] would be very much appreciated; it'd be great to
collect that stuff in the wiki I guess. Tor prolly has more concrete
ideas about how the Android widgets work, but of course there is a lot
to do.

        To interact with the developers, the best list is the
libreoffice-ux-advise@lists.freedesktop.org list, where there should be
both hackers, and other artists.

        Please bear in mind though, that, while we'll use whatever cool ideas
that we can, that are easiest and best to implement as we go, and we
very much appreciate some deep competitive analysis - that this is
ultimately useful and appreciate advice to the developers doing the
work :-)

        Anyhow - thanks for getting involved ! I look forward to what you come
up with.

        All the best,

                Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks@suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot