[Libreoffice-ux-advise] New Template Dialog on Mac OSX

[Mirek M.]

Hi Alex,

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 9:24 AM, Alexander Thurgood
<alex.thurgood at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> So, I've just got around to looking at this on Mac OSX (sorry about
> that, but getting a debug build takes forever) and have a few questions
> / remarks :
>
> (1) why is there no "Back" button or arrow ?
>
> What I mean by this is that when a user clicks on a category of
> templates, at least on OSX, he/she has no way of navigating back to the
> upper hierarchy via a simple back button, indeed as is standard in the
> OSX HMI which uses the Finder dialogs for this sort of thing. Even the
> old template manager dialog had one.
>

AFAIK, the new OS X file management uses no back button as well. [1]
Instead, clicking a folder "expands" it and clicking away folds it back.
The folders in the template dialog should work somewhat similarly --
clicking away or clicking "X" should dismiss a folder overlay and return
back to the upper hierarchy.

>
> (2) one can not use the scroll arrows to scroll down the list of
> template entries in any given category - trying to do so just results in
> the upper main category buttons being commuted selectively from left to
> right or right to left depending on which scroll arrow key is pressed.
> The user has to use the mouse or touchpad to scroll down.
>
> (3) for some reason, the collection of templates in any given
> sub-category is displayed as two overlaid transparent examples of the
> templates in that category, perhaps the first and the last, I don't
> know, but the fact that they are overlaid each other in a transparency
> mode doesn't make it at all obvious what exactly is being represented
> and does not look particularly good (but maybe that's just a matter of
> personal taste, like so many GUI things) - is it supposed to be like this ?
>

I would say that's partly my fault for not devoting time to designing a
folder. (The original design was a non-transparent stack [2], but I agree
we could do much better.)
Rafael, would you be willing to implement a different look for a folder if
we designed it?

>
> I also managed to get OSX to crash when attempting to use the scroll
> arrow keys, but will have to see if this a one-off, or reproducible.
>
>
> In terms of OSX HMI design this will not do anything to increase LO's
> popularity on that platform, in fact I believe you will be more likely
> to drive people away with stuff like this. What, if any, further feature
> development is planned ? I realise that a lot of work went into this and
> am grateful for that, but when re-thinking UI design, please spare a
> thought for all of the OSes for which LO is built and provided.
>
> Alex
>

P.S. Could you post a screenshot?

[1]
http://cdn-static.cnet.co.uk/i/c/rv/e/software/apple/mountain-lion/mountain-lion-icloud-document-library.jpg
[2] http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/images/e/e8/Templs.png
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