The future of Calligra Active

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 14 March 2013 00:26:28 Shantanu Tushar Jha wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> During the Calligra sprint last week, we were discussing over Calligra
> Active's future. One good thing that came along is that we started work on
> creating reusable Calligra QML components that can be used in isolation to
> render documents, and perform basic viewing operations. This will help in
> creating Calligra touch UIs for Sailfish etc. Work on this has started and
> we already have the component for Text Documents :)

Great! So it's a bit like a QML equivalent to kparts (not code-wise, but the 
way they can be used)?

> Another question that came up (follow-up of [1]) was whether Calligra
> Active should remain as a single application to handle every document type,
> or do we want to have a Active version for each corresponding Desktop app.
> The main reason this was an idea is because going by PA's workflow, when we
> would like to create documents we just need to fire the text document
> editing program and it would do its job. A technical motivation behind
> doing that is the difference in the way text docs, spreadsheets,
> presentations are handled in code. For example, text docs are limited in
> size, scroll vertically; spreadsheets are virtually unlimited and scroll in
> both directions; while slideshows don't really "scroll", we switch slides.
> Due to this handling of special cases, the code is also kind of complex and
> breaking it into independent bits might help. There are other factors like
> the way we handle mimetypes etc.
> 
> These were the points what we discussed about whether or not to split, but
> in the end, its very important to know if this makes sense from PA's
> perspective, especially usability.
> 
> CA should stay as it is right now? Or have separate apps? Thoughts?

As already expressed on the Calligra mailing list, from my perspective it 
makes sense to split the applications up. Of course UIs should be consistent 
wherever it makes sense, but this should be ensured by HIGs, not by a common 
UI being forced onto different usage patterns. Reading a text document simply 
isn't the same thing as doing a presentation, so they cannot have identical 
UIs.
Other than that, with the task-centric paradigm, users should not notice 
whether they're using different applications or not anyways. As you already 
mentioned, we don't want users to ever start "Calligra Active", but instead 
"Create a Presentation" or "Open letter XYZ". Therefore there shouldn't be a 
central "Home Screen" for CA anyway, and thus there would be no advantage from 
the user's perspective in cramming it all into one application.

So splitting is good, we want UIs to be as modular as possible so that they 
can be weaved together to create workflow tools.

Cheers,
Thomas