[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Libreoffice] [PATCH] Make the toolbars not popping-up randomly

[Stefan Knorr (Astron)]

Hi,

I'll just post a quick reply here, since I was mentioned by name and
since I meant to write something in this thread anyway for a few days
now.

Some opinions:

* About Christoph's assessment of toolbars popping up on the bottom
being hard to notice for novices: I at least 90% agree. We could have
some colourful animation to highlight the new bar, but I imagine that
would be annoying after a rather short while.

* In my eyes, Tim's patch hides a symptom, instead of fixing the root
cause: instead of making the insertion of contextual toolbars smoother
(smooth scrolling, short animation [1]), it attaches contextual
toolbars to the bottom (where they don't really belong).

* I too wanted to promote Mirek's great Citrus work. Which leads us to:

On 21 November 2011 22:00, Christoph Noack <christoph at dogmatux.com> wrote:
> If we want to go a bit further, I'm sure Mirek will be able to offer
> some very good ideas. He works on the so called "Citrus UI" ... I missed
> the time to provide proper feedback (very sorry for that, especially
> since it looks like a very promising start for LibreOffice), but Astron
> did. So CCing both to keep them in the loop and kindly asking you to
> have a look:
> http://clickortap.wordpress.com/

I'll just link to the relevant thread from the design list:
http://www.mail-archive.com/design@global.libreoffice.org/msg03311.html

You'll notice, I was initially quite sceptical to the float bar idea,
but I think I'm warming to it.  On the pro side, it's much more
contextual and compact than a side pane could ever be – at the price
that it can't use the effectively "dead" screen space to the sides of
the pages quite as efficiently.
What still really needs to be solved is the question how to place it
close to large elements that cover 80% or more of the vertical screen
space – scrolling parts of these elements of screen isn't an option,
neither is covering other UI.


Astron [2]


[1] Animations need a capable animation framework. This is the same
thing that still holds back the new header/footer indicator,
currently.
[2] Yes, this the first mail in which the From field contains my real
name, but please keep referring to me as Astron.