Re: [Libreoffice-ux-advise] Android design?

Hi Michael,
(Since this is purely UI talk, I'm only answering on the UX advise mailing
list)

2012/2/8 Michael Meeks <michael.meeks@suse.com>

> On Wed, 2012-02-08 at 13:43 +0100, Stefan Knorr (Astron) wrote:
> > Hehe. Take a look at the amazing mock-up and ideas that Mirek has been
> > working on for a while now:
> > http://clickortap.wordpress.com/frivl/
>
>         They look nice :-)

Thanks. :)

> > (No, none of this is perfectly specced out yet, but there's some
> > pretty cool stuff there.)
>
>         So - one thing that I (personally) rather dislike is this "bold /
> italic / underline" meme that still lurks heavily in new UI designs.
> IMHO these need to be firmly held underwater until they expire ;-) Good
> mockups around making styles more visible and manageable, creating (and
> customizing) new styles [ which can indeed include the
> bold/italic/underline elements ;-] much appreciated for that.

I beg to differ here: having up-front "Bold", "Italic", and "Underline"
buttons for quick formatting is always going to be better than forcing the
user to go through a drop-down menu for these items. If the user later
wishes to color all bolded items in the document, he can use the search
tool for that.

I did hide the font and size drop downs under the overflow menu, though,
since they are almost always use for whole paragraphs -- paragraph styles
are more appropriate here.

I also put in two distinct style drop downs -- one for paragraph styles,
one for character styles, to differentiate between what the styles apply to
and so that a person using styles frequently doesn't have to continually
switch between "character" and "paragraph" tabs.

In Citrus UI, I used
colors<http://clickortap.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/prominent-styles/>to
make style drop downs more prominent, but this didn't seem appropriate
for Android's Holo theme.

>        Otherwise, some good ideas there. Do we have excitable people
> wanting
> to do UI work in Java - that we can plug together with the core in due
> course ? it'd be great to parallelise that work.
>
>        Thanks,
>
>                Michael.
>
> --
> michael.meeks@suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot