[Libreoffice] LO status bar annoyances

[Kohei Yoshida]

On Tue, 2010-11-30 at 10:34 -0500, Kevin Hunter wrote:
> At 9:54am -0500 Tue, 30 Nov 2010, Kohei Yoshida wrote:
> > Sorry I have to disagree there. I'm the one who put that icon there,
> > and the reason for that was to have a visually obvious way to tell
> > whether or not the document is currently modified. A lot of people
> > were using the save icon status for that purpose, but some users
> > (including myself) also didn't like the fact that you can't always
> > save the document especially when the app *thinks* it's not modified
> > (note: there are times when the document is marked unmodified, but
> > some data are modified such as the cursor position, zoom level
> > etc.).
> 
> Guilty as charged.  That's how I've historically known if it's time to 
> save.  (Because I can't be bothered to remember if I've done anything, 
> right?! ;-) )  But seriously, when I'm at a lull in thinking, I'll 
> glance there because I'm wary of the (historically) fairly regular 
> crashes of OO/LO and don't want to lose too much work.  I think I was 
> aware that the status icon was there, but it's not in my repertoire to 
> look there because it's somewhat hard to find (takes me a second to find 
> it, as opposed to the bigger, more distinct icon in the upper left).

Well, I'm not sure if it's *that* hard to find.  I myself find it easy
enough to see the lower middle part of the window in the corner of my
eye. :-)  Sebastian even found it annoying enough, which tells us that
it was rather close to being "right in your face" for him. ;-)

BTW, it was originally a simple textural '*' in that small window of the
status bar, which was pretty much ignored by almost all users that I've
come in contact with.

> Would not one response be that the logic behind the enabling/disabling 
> of the save button ought to be updated?  

Sure, any suggestions are welcome for this.

> If a document can be saved, the 
> save button ought to be enabled, yes?

Absolutely.  And when the document can be always saved, the icon remains
enabled at all times.  But many users didn't like that and started
filing bugs left and right for it.

Kohei

-- 
Kohei Yoshida, LibreOffice hacker, Calc
<kyoshida at novell.com>