[Libreoffice-ux-advise] drawing toolbar interactions

[Astron]

Hi everyone (this time)
So, Michael and I had this private conversation... accidentally,
because I didn't find the reply to all button.
Anyway, here was my proposal:

> On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 11:31 AM, Michael Meeks <michael.meeks at novell.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, 2011-07-29 at 22:07 +0200, Christoph Noack wrote:
>>> Furthermore, I'd like to ask whether the user is aware what mode is
>>> currently activated - the drawing toolbar is _not_ sufficient to do that
>>
>>        Presumably by seeing which button is depressed on the toolbar we can
>> see that. Currently that state just flickers / magically changes when
>> you've finished drawing your shape. I suppose we propose keeping that to
>> show which item is selected, and hence what mode we're in. Or did I
>> mis-understand the question :-)
>
> I think what Christoph meant was that this is good, but not enough.
> For instance, as a proposal, LibO could put a hatching on the window
> background when it is in any mode except selection mode (that wouldn't
> help when the document is zoomed in very far and the background isn't
> visible, but most of the time it would be useful).
> Now, I am unsure if this is within the scope of this bug or if we
> should let Federico do his thing and in the meantime the design team
> could come up with some ideas for later implementation (if it is as
> simple (?) as a hatching, it could even target 3.5).


Now one of Christoph's earlier mails:
> In this case, Inkscape is different, because it is a real advanced
> drawing application, they don't have that much toolbars flying around,
> they provide excellent feedback via the statusbar.

I'd be wary of starting to rely too much on status bars, when everyone
(Microsoft, Apple, GNOME, Mozilla, Google, probably others) is
currently removing them.


So, now some replies to the last mail

>>       Ah - ok; well - we could turn the grid on while in this mode to provide
>> some visual indication ;-) presumably it is most useful when drawing.

That would be a good idea, if some people didn't keep it turned on all
the time. Probably not an option, also for the reason Christoph
mentioned.


> Again, I still don't know whether we affect the behavior for Impress as
> well.

Yes, it would. Impress basically adds animations and slideshows (maybe
more, but so much's apparent from the code's folder structure) to the
core of Draw.


> Options are sometimes helpful, but usually a "the guys didn't knew it
> better" - so I'm rather for a sane behavior.

Seconded. There are so many options and we already have at least two
new ones in 3.5 (default sheet number for spreadsheets and the grid
line behaviour on coloured backgrounds).

Regards,
Astron.

(Reply to all - check.)