About Calligra Active and what it should intend to be

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Monday 03 October 2011 Oct, Vít Pelčák wrote:
> 2011/10/3 Shantanu Tushar Jha <jhahoneyk at gmail.com>:
> > Hi,
> >
> > (Cross posting as the topic might be of interest to both MLs)
> >
> > There was recently some discussion on the Active ML about Calligra Active
> > and how to make the user experience better.
> > Aaron Seigo had an interesting suggestion in the mail he sent [1] which
> > says-
> >
> > "
> > but imho the most important thing is for these
> > projects to focus on being amazing document _viewers_.
> > "
> 
> I thought, Okular is for that. Why should I have Calligra installed?
> What is advantage? To have bazilion of viewers each being able to open
> only specific document?

For both the N900 and the N9, there's one document viewer, based on Calligra. And onthe N9 it also shows PDF documents, in addition to all the current office file formats. One viewer, optimized for the platform. Calligra Active can be that viewer for Active.

> > I gave it a thought and realised that we need to discuss this. The reason I
> > can think of is that a larger percentage of the use cases are for viewing
> > the documents instead of editing them.
> 
> Hm. And if user has associated LibreOffice already (very likely scenario)?

LibreOffice on a tablet? That's not going to give a good user experience. I've seen LibreOffice on a WeTab, and it was not a pretty sight. Calligra is actually really good as a document viewer these days, and it's easy to create a nice gui that fits the platform, using QML.

> 
> > I'd like views from the Calligra team about this, should we continue what
> > we're doing now (that is, try to improve the viewing to the most we can and
> > then go to editing), or concentrate only on viewing?
> 
> Sorry, but I'm missing point here.
> 
> What should make me switch from LibreOffice to Calligra? Focus of
> Calligra on viewing documents and lack of editing tools?
> 
> I thought, that the major advantage of Calligra/Koffice lies in fact,
> that, unlike LibreOffice, it doesn't carry burden of legacy code.

And can be adapted to have any kind of UX you need. Using QWidget, MeegoTouch or QML.

> What type of user is your target? Mainstream will have LibreOffice
> already installed. What is advantage? Faster startup time when startup
> of application means only insignificant portion of whole time spent in
> program?

The advantage is a user interface optimized for touch.

> 
> Decision is still yours, but personally, I don't consider focus on
> viewing as good idea at all.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org, http://www.boudewijnrempt.nl