Workspace proposal

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 20 November 2012 22:05, Sven Langkamp <sven.langkamp at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I have been discussing this on IRC with boemann and ingwa and to clear
> things up I did write it down.
>
> This a proposal for a new UI for our tool docker/box UI. Proposal can
> be found here: http://depot.tu-dortmund.de/get/r6n9u
>
> This is just a thing that I would like to see in Words/Stage. Might
> even be that I'm too much thinking as a developer there ;)
> Would be interesting to hear what you think about.
>

Nice proposal, the contextual approach is quite close to Kexi's modern UI.
Some random notes follow...

First obvious question: what's happens with the main menu and the main
toolbar when the GUI becomes contextual?

That leads me to the modern UI's tabbed toolbar [
http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/calligra/kexi/the-kexi-main-window.html]
where the menu and toolbar become redundant if there are also context-aware
side panels, so they deserve some merging.

In 2.1 you mention drop-down tools on the top toolbar. These are already
present in the sidebar docks of current Words, just but moving them to the
top utilized the top area space nicely (this lets us to have simpler
toolbars by grouping actions). This alone can be perceived as positive
change of MS Office 2007+ too, enabling live preview of formatting. As a
side effect it leads to reducing role of modal dialogs. Such a feature has
been reported as right choice from usability POV by some usability
professionals; see Result oriented UIs at
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/wysiwyg.html and some notes on MS Office UIs
at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/application-design-showcase-1.html.

The 'Welcome' page you point on the Qt Creator's screenshot, has been
adopted in Kexi already (Modern Menu; http://blogs.kde.org/node/4405), and
I confirm it simplifies the app, and gives 'lighter' feeling. In fact
Creator finally convinced me to go this way, it does better job of
utilizing available space than the old-school welcome dialog of Qt Designer.

Also, nice note about extensibility of the solution (also via plugins). But
as the main menu becomes bigger this needs to be addressed somehow.

-- 
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
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