[Libreoffice] simple app background gradients ...

[Michael Meeks]

Hi guys,

On Sat, 2011-01-08 at 22:20 +0100, Christoph Noack wrote:
> Am Samstag, den 08.01.2011, 02:05 +0100 schrieb Bernhard Dippold:
> > > I was thinking of a nice background instead of a static colour.
> > > You can find some of my design here
> > > http://rahulprasad.com/public/libreOffice/writer/
..
> "That's one small step for developer, one giant leap for LibreOffice."

	Well - it is a few lines of code for sure. I attach the awful hack to
give a weirdo gradient as the background instead of grey; picture here
http://users.freedesktop.org/~michael/gradient.png - most likeyl I can't
sepell either ;-)

	Anyhow - the patch is clearly too simple - we need to get offsets right
for re-painting sub-regions.

> The very first step is, indeed, to know how much effort it required to
> show graphics (whatever kind) on / instead of the application
> background.

	It is really rather easy I think. The complexity is mostly around good
taste [ which often vanishes at this point ], and about the
interactions.

	Eg. having a forest scene is all well and good - relaxing etc. but it
could (potentially) break the desktop metaphore - at least, as I see a
viewport scroll, I don't think of it sliding pages over a document, I
think of myself as moving down the document ;-) [ perhaps this is just
me ]. The problem with my view though, is - where do we get more image
from to back a 1000 page document ? ie. I don't think photos work here,
unless they are static, which would prolly look odd.

	Other problems:

	* we can of course only do this for 'writer' and
	  'draw/impress' I guess; we should do both, not just one.

	* this may give us some very real performance hit when
	  scrolling on older hardware [ or perhaps not - hard to
	  know ] - currently we pull out a lot of stops to try to
	  get smooth scrolling; this could vandalise all that quite
	  easily.

	Of course; making the page surround / backdrop somewhat more pleasant
to look at and sexy is not impossibly difficult either; but gradients
are effectively images: they cost CPU. Probably we need to reconcile
ourselves to this sometime (like right now), but having a team of people
enthusiastic to fight off the "it doesn't work on my 486 with Trident
graphics anymore" chappies would be appreciated.

> In context, it is on "our" proposal collection page for the StartCenter:
> http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Experience/StartCenter#Mockups

	I guess the start center is another target, with (no doubt) a different
code path again.

> Ouch! Some time before (2007?), I have been told that changing anything
> which is beyond the document border is pretty hard. I would be more than
> happy if anything can prove this to be wrong ;-)

	;-)

> This (for example) is the reason for not having shadows on the right
> side for the Writer comments/notes (instead, we live with 80's style
> shadow for the pages).

	Really ? we should have an easy hack to improve that too I suppose. I
was going to add a number today from the UI suggestions, but didn't get
there - sorry ...

	Hmm,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks at novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: gradient.diff
Type: text/x-patch
Size: 1057 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/attachments/20110128/341d2643/attachment.bin>