[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Proposed changes

[Cedric Bosdonnat]

Hi Alex,

On Wed, 2012-12-05 at 16:37 +0100, Alex Thurgood wrote:
> 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).

Could you help me see what you mean for the transparency preview
problem?

For the selection mode, I agree this is not really obvious. May be we
need a better icon there to explain what it is all about.

For the ESC to quit the dialog, don't worry, this is a bug I need to
fix: not by design.

> 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.

Yes, I fear we are introducing something too different from the rest of
the application...

> 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.

Well, I'm not sure I can improve that and I have no MacOS X to
understand what you mean.

> 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.

Hum, Glade is there only to create XML files we can parse to replace the
old SRC files. At least now, we have a visual editor and can get rid of
the old absolute-positions layout.

Could anyone from the design team come up with a Glade file to help me
fix the problems of that dialog? It would also be a nice occasion to
switch the template manager to the new layout code.

The problems I want to fix:
  * There is no visual separation between top buttons, toolbar and items
view. The color on the mockup is nice, but something that fits with
platform theme is needed.
  * Get rid of those selection buttons (they don't even work properly
ATM)
  * Better icon for the Selection mode.

FYI, what I currently have looks like this on Gnome 3:
http://people.freedesktop.org/~cbosdo/template-mgr.png

Just a side note: I managed to find time to work on this... if I can't
get that fixed quickly, I'll have to put it in experimental features
again. We have until Jan. 7th to have a fixed UI and I'll be away from
Dec. 22nd to Jan. 6th.

--
Cedric