[Libreoffice-ux-advise] InfoBars: problem when stacking too many of those

[Stefan Knorr]

Hello all,

the following is just an idea of mine (yes, the discussion is ~over, I
know):
In general, I agree with Mirek's stance of "don't overuse the info
bars." Still, to cover some more possible cases:
How about overlaying all infobars on top of each other, but push every
subsequent infobar ~2 pixels down and make it a bit darker (or lighter).
This way, you should easily be able to fit a few bars in the average
window without it looking too ugly. If there are any more than three
bars, you could show a counter, something like (4) or so.
To see all bars, one could go either of two ways:

* Create a hover effect where when the mouse hovers over the bars, they
all automatically expand (might not be a good idea, given how we killed
two hover features since two 3.6.0 already)

* Let the user scroll through the info bars with the mouse wheel/touch
scrolling

Additionally, we might indeed want to use colour to discriminate between
different types of notifications. "Your document is unreadable" and
"Printing ..." should definitely have different importances. Likewise,
we could push more grave notifications above less grave ones.

Lastly, for notifications the user really needs to see, we could think
about an elevation scheme when there are too many bars already, i.e. the
normally non-modal alert would become a normal modal window. (Of course,
this somewhat bears the question if there really should ever be a
modeless notification that users have to answer.)

Astron.