[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Killed the ButtonBar in slide sorter

Jan Holesovsky kendy at suse.cz
Tue Sep 25 07:00:07 PDT 2012


Hi Cor,

Cor Nouws píše v Út 25. 09. 2012 v 14:58 +0200:

> > I've talked to an Impress power user recently, and he was complaining
> > about the buttons in the slide sorter [the thing you can see on the
> > attached screenshot].  This was actually not the first complaint I got,
> > and also I remembered our discussions that we should do something about
> > them, so I decided to just kill them for now:
> 
> Hmm, currently the pop-up is the (only?) way to see the name of the slide.
> How should we think about that?

That is not changed currently, as that is a tooltip, and shows outside
the slide; so even if somebody clicked on that by mistake , it has no
effect, compared to the Button bar, where you usually end up with a
hidden or duplicated slide [happened few times even to me - but IIRC
I've never went with the mouse far enough to start the
presentation ;-)].

> And does the removing also refer to the little toolbar in the side pane?
> (If I see the number of line changes in the commit, I guess yes...)

Not sure if I understand you correctly; I removed the "Button bar" that
is highlighted on the screenshot attached to the original mail, which I
think you refer to as 'the little toolbar' - but not sure.

> Therefore the good OpenOffice.org developers and people conducted a 
> large project some years ago, Renaissance.
> Of course the toolbar is one of the changes the was a result from that.
> I guess all the work was done, because many obvious actions are not easy 
> enough accessible for Joe-average. And that these were only the first 
> steps in a route to make Impress (&more) more contemporary.
> The little pop-ups fit more in modern UI (-expectations) I guess then 
> context menu's - let alone short-cuts and pull down menus...

I don't think I agree with you here.  The touch-based devices need to
have everything shown, nothing appearing based on a presence of a mouse
pointer; and it seems to me as a good trend in general.  Please note
that Renaissance is 3-4 years old project.

I have heard complaints about this Button bar from several people, and
no 'oh, I love these appearing buttons' - so I believe we are fine.  The
same with the appearing / disappearing header / footer controls - lots
of complaints that it is too much disruptive, so I believe that not
using any controls that appear after a timeout only supports that the
above mentioned trend is Good :-)

All the best,
Kendy



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