UI and such for Sections

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 10 December 2011 02:32, C. Boemann <cbo at boemann.dk> wrote:
> On Friday 09 December 2011 17:15:10 Dan Jensen wrote:
>> Hi everybody,
>>
>>   Over the last couple of days i've been poking about with trying to
>> come up with some UI that'll fit into how the rest of the Calligra
>> Words UI works, and have come up with what i believe will be the
>> lest-impact solution to this. i have (as suggested by Jaroslav) looked
>> at libreoffice's implementation of this, and adapted some of their
>> work to fit better into Calligra's workflows. What this means is:
>> There are two dialogues which you can see here (one embeds the other),
>> and there are two ways of reaching the addition, removing and editing
>> of sections functionality (one through the menu, one through the
>> status bar inspired by the page styles bit). The sections part of the
>> status bar is only shown in case the cursor is, in fact, inside a
>> section (this is also why it is at the right, as this hiding/unhiding
>> behaviour would otherwise cause the page style controls to move around
>> all the time, which is obviously not a good idea).
>>   Whiteboard sketch here:
>> http://www.flickr.com/photos/49031477@N00/6482274775/in/photostream
>>   So, if you have things to make comment on for this, please do so, i
>> should love to hear them :)
> Hmmm, I thought we agreed that you should call for an irc meeting. Besides a
> 99% copy of the LO ui for sections is definitely not what we want. LO is hardly
> worth copying when it comes to ui.

Well I think Dan does two things right and these are important:

1. Shares his results in advance so others can prepare for discussion.
This takes time and is as important as interactive work like IRC
meetings, it's also a must-have have useful results. Let's have more
people working this way and in this very area.

2. Yes - preparing for discussion means having counter-proposals in hand for
specific UI elements like dialogs. If there is nothing
clearly much more usable proposed (yes flexible as we aim for covering many ODF
features) than LO, it's safe to assume LO does many things well
enough to be a template for us. While Words improves expotentially, I
remember KWord had surprisingly geeky format dialogs, with set of
check boxes of secondary importance named strictly after technical ODF
terms. So my idea is so often to learn what's good in the other suites. I am
personally hunting for ideas (as in art) looking at more than dozen
apps. Each app brings something right to the table!

So it should surprise me when I hear 'we should not copy anything from
LO UI'. Maybe there's some misconception: LO's UI framework may be poor
and thus UI implementation has its limits but the UX design is worth
to look at. Especially that as I see modal dialogs would stay in
many Calligra apps, it's hard to make everything different. If even we do
some massive rework (other than a mere permutation of GUI elements!),
try to think about surprised users. NO for 'Negationism' in software.

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek
 Kexi & Calligra (kexi-project.org, identi.ca/kexi, calligra-suite.org)
 KDE Software Development Platform on MS Windows (windows.kde.org)