Calligra Author's GUI

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 15 August 2012 17:09, Inge Wallin <inge at lysator.liu.se> wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 15, 2012 14:27:07 Jaroslaw Staniek wrote:
>> Hi,
>> It's nice we're reaching new users!
>> The first question that pops up for me is: will we try to depart from
>> the KDE4 UI style for Calligra Author to make it non-intrusive and
>> pleasant?
>> Or at least in some full-screen mode?
>>
>> See what I mean: http://tentblogger.com/writing-apps/
>
> We have that already.  under the View menu you will find full-screen mode.
>
> If you want something in between you can toggle the dockers with ctrl-h
>
>
>> Many of them are real killers at being non-intrusive.
>>
>> For a discussion on this aspect please see
>> http://mac.appstorm.net/general/opinion/are-minimalist-writing-apps-necessa
>> ry/
>
> What you have to remember is that the writing itself is only one aspect of the
> writing process. I read an essay by a novelist saying that it takes about 40%
> of the total time to create a novel. Editing takes another 40% and 20% is
> planning of what to actually write if I remember correctly. Our goal is to
> support all phases of the writing process up until publishing. In the light of
> that, a full-screen mode is a pretty minor thing.

That's true, I also heard of those statistics. I did not say avoiding
of distraction is needed for all the phases. It's just definitely
welcome for the creative phase. Writers close the doors, musicians
gather with the band mates in a closed studio, you get the idea.

This can be even extrapolated to software developers - I cannot
explain why I stay with Qt Creator when there's KDevelop.

>> Do we have a brainstorm wiki page for Author already?
>
> No, but I'm going to open one tonight.
>
>> On a technical side if the maintainers decide to go this way, that
>> would be of course another showcase for flexibility of the codebase...
>> As it's a new app and we could target KDE 5 (whatever it's going to
>> be), not KDE 4.
>
> I'm going to target Calligra 2.6 already for the first release. Of course that
> version will only have 1 or 2 major features that is not in Calligra Words
> already.

Sven said 'You can have both UI modes' and that's the 'win-win'
approach I assumed will appear here.

When I am thinking about difference to Words... maybe Author could
have less features presented by default.

I am also hoping the old idea of dropping Save command completely in
favour of 'Autosaving+History+Save As'
will be considered in case of Author (Mac apps started to do that at
one point). It's a paradox to me that web apps are perceives as
unsable/unsafe regarding storage but effectively, some of them are
apparently more pro-user regarding storage. Examples: I lost far less
content in gmail than in KMail 1/2 because the former autosaves the
mails as drafts.

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 Kexi & Calligra & KDE | http://calligra.org/kexi | http://kde.org
 Qt Certified Specialist | http://qt-project.org
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek