[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Proposed changes

[Alex Thurgood]

Le 05/12/2012 14:24, Cedric Bosdonnat a écrit :

Hi all,


> I'm also pretty annoyed by that pseudo-Macos look of the filtering
> buttons... couldn't we have something less inspired from some
> OS-specifics? Changing these buttons into something less
> visually-imposing would also give some more importance to the Selection
> Mode button.
> 

I already mentioned my concerns about LO on OSX with regard to the
not-so-good looking transparency preview effect of the majority of the
templates (the only ones that look good IMHO, are the presentation
templates) and to be honest, the whole button filter thing
selecting/unselecting, reversing out or up the template hierarchy has me
lost. Also, pressing Esc to make the dialog disappear is not
particularly intuitive (it might well be on a touch screen that has a
back button/swipe, but I can't think of anywhere else in LO where that
is the case).

The problem is that this is the only dialog in the whole program that
behaves this particular way as far as I can tell and it sticks out like
a sore thumb.

I fear that there is no real "middle-way" at the moment though, what
with the UIs being so different between OSX/GTK/Windows, so I guess that
latitude for change is somewhat limited. On OSX, most GTK apps look like
they are a relic of the 90's. Even the massive Gimp project has only
just released a native OSX application (sept 2012), most of the other
GTK look n feel apps currently available were built for Leopard (10.5)
or earlier and remind the user of the dread X11 or Quartz UI.

NeoOffice has a more (but not completely) aqua-ified LNF (especially
with the dialogs), but I seem to recall that they used a fair bit of
Java to get there and we can't even re-use the code due to the licence :-/

Possibly, whatever happens, OSX people are going to moan that the app is
becoming more and more X11-like, and this won't be helped by the fact
that Glade was chosen to further dialog-UI development, even if it is
converted to VCL.


Alex