Re: [Libreoffice-ux-advise] Java GUI for Libre-Office Based Android App(s)

2012/4/26 Tor Lillqvist <tml@iki.fi>

> > I see your GSoC project "Java GUI for Libre-Office Based Android App(s)"
> has
> > been accepted.
>
> Umm, I am the mentor, not the student doing it, you know that right? ;)

Yes, that's what I meant.

> > Would you be interested in working on it along with the
> > design team?
>
> Sure, definitely.

Great. :)

> > What scope should we design for? Could our designs incorporate
> > basic editing (+formatting) commands or would that not be useful to you?
>
> I think we would be satisfied if what is achieved during GSoC is
> purely viewer app(s), for text documents, spreadsheets and
> presentations.  (Supporting an as large set of formats as possible for
> each.)
>
> Being able to edit brings in many more technical issues (not just UI
> ones) that need to be solved. But one can of course always hope that
> just a viewer turns out to be trivial, and the student and I have time
> to work on editing, too.

Should there be a separate view mode, then, or would the viewing UI
gradually develop into an editing UI?

> There aren't really many concrete plans yet. We don't know for
> instance whether it will make sense to combine handling of all three
> document types (text, spreadsheet, presentation) into one app, or have
> a separate one for each.

Will your decision depend largely on the technical difficulties posed by
each option, or is this more of a UX problem?

> > What should be our priorities -- a UI for the file manager, a generic
> file
> > viewer, Writer, Impress, ...?
>
> I guess first you should look at competing products and see what they
> do. I don't have any Android device (yet) myself even, so I have no
> clue if a "file manager" makes sense or not, and typically exists in
> Android apps. (I have an iPad and Apple's Pages, Numbers and Keynote
> on it, and on iOS, or in those apps, there definitely is no "file
> manager" in the desktop style, at least.)

Not in the desktop style. What I meant was something used to manage
LibreOffice files within LibreOffice, since Android has no generic file
manager, something more akin to Gnome Documents. Take a look at
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Whiteboards/File_Manager to get
a better idea.

> I *think* that if we need to choose, presentations might be the kind
> of document we should start with.
>
> I found this link somewhere:
> http://www.christopherstark.de/extern/LO-Android/Android_LO.html , is
> this from somebody also on the LibreOffice design team, or an
> independent person? That design of course is for editing-capable apps.

It's from a member of the design team.

> This discussion should really be on the public LibreOffice development
> mailing list... please forward your original mail and this my reply to
> it, if it is OK with you.

I'll forward it to the UX advise mailing list (where developers and
designers meet).

> --tml