Some of the things needed for 1.0

[Shantanu Tushar Jha]

Hi,


On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 5:20 PM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

Nice ideas, I'm curious about the workflows that were decided during the
sprint, is there any documentation/examples on that? Or, if you guys are
still working in on it, I'm eager to have a look when its ready :)

>
> 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_.
>

Hmm this is an interesting point (to focus only on viewing), I will discuss
this with the Calligra team.


>
> 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 :)
>

Well, in that case, we need to create a QML UI for okular which I'm not sure
how difficult it is. But yes, if it is doable, then it will be pretty neat
if everything can use same UI components.
And secondly, I'd like to use similar UI components as other Active apps use
(buttons etc like in image viewer), how to do that?


>
> 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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> Shantanu Tushar    (UTC +0530)
http://www.shantanutushar.com
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