Some of the things needed for 1.0

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday, October 2, 2011 08:42:51 Carl Symons wrote:
> As it currently is, Calligra Active is not ready for the tablet.

i agree with your assessment.

if we put everyone's points together, we get something like this:

* Calligra and Okular both are "document viewers". While there is some overlap 
in the formats supported or planned to be supported, they don't show all of 
the same document formats.

* We have the ability to embed into or launch from such a shell either 
Calligra apps or Okular, and this could be driven by the file type in question

* Calligra and Okular document viewer windows have different UI experiences, 
and neither is exactly ready for prime time usage on a tablet

* We need/want a universal viewer shell that starts with a great touch-based 
UI for exploring and opening files

does that about sum it up?

if so, i'd like us to consider that this is actually two separate, though 
highly related, goals:

* a document collection explorer

* a set of document viewers

the collection explorer is currently served by some combination of:

* Activities
* file manager and/or file dialog
* Nepomuk-driven listings (those "purdy buttons" seen when Calligra Active 
starts)

Activities are really shaping up into something beautiful and useful. the 
other two items are not so great yet.

we the Plasma Active Workshop the other week we worked on some concepts for 
quickly and easily sort and select large numbers of documents. the target file 
type was "photos" but we realized the same workflow could be broadly applied 
to any kind of file.

building a great "full lifecycle" workflow for working with documents, be they 
images or spreadsheets or essays or e-books or web sites or ..., should be a 
hot focus item for us in the next Plasma Active developmen cycles.

we can then separate out the "document collection explorer" part of this from 
the equation. Calligra Active and Okular would then both become squarely 
focused on viewing the documents, leaving the "how does the user start these 
components" up to the environment. same thing with Bangarang, imho.

we already have a (very early) start to this with the active image viewer, and 
we have the workflows that the interaction designers worked on the other week.

Calligra and Okular developers would be VERY welcome to help us design and 
implement this infrastructure. but imho the most important thing is for these 
projects to focus on being amazing document _viewers_.

having a consistent UI concept that both can adopt for common things like "how 
to position content", "how to show UI chrome", "how to enter and leave full 
screen display", "how to zoom, pan and move between pages in the document" 
should be made as consistent as possible between them.

how to technologically achieve that consistency is an open question left to 
those projects: by sharing UI components (QML?), by embedding the different 
viewers in one shared control shell .. or some other genius idea :)

and when we split it up like that, it becomes evident what we need to work on:

* the generic document collection overview interface

* the "paged documents" viewer interface language

* implementing that viewer interface language in both calligra and okular

then we use Calligra apps with the formats they are best at viewing, Okular 
with the formats it is best at viewing and share the document collection 
viewer apparatus between those, and indeed all other media display, apps.

thoughts?

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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