[Libreoffice] [PUSHED] fdo#31251 - Improve default page layout

[Christoph Noack]

Hi Sébastien, hi all!

Am Donnerstag, den 03.03.2011, 14:16 +0100 schrieb Sébastien Le Ray:
> Le Thu, 03 Mar 2011 11:59:19 +0000,
> Michael Meeks <michael.meeks at novell.com> a écrit :
> 
> > Hi Sebastien,
> > 
> > On Tue, 2011-03-01 at 23:42 +0100, Sébastien Le Ray wrote:
> > > Here is a complete patch for fdo#31251. It adds a smooth shadow to
> > > the page.
> > 
> > 	Wow - it is really pretty indeed :-) I just pushed it. Nice
> > work ! can you confirm is it LGPLv3+/MPL ?

Although I didn't see it yet, thanks for your work - I'm really looking
forward.

[...]

> > 	Incidentally, it would be lovely to have the post-it notes,
> > not only to have a border, but to have curved corners at the bottom,
> > but not the top, so they really look like sticky notes. ie. take a
> > sticky note an stick it flat on your desk, and you see the effect
> > [ both bottom corners curl slightly ] ;-) possibly that will require
> > some (manual?) re-coloring action of the bitmaps, which might be
> > slightly painful, though I guess it is just a matter of keeping a
> > constant AlphaMask bitmap around, and merging it into a BitmapEx with
> > a Bitmap (of the same size obviously) 'Erase'd with the correct color
> > for the note.
> 
> Notes are my next target, but I'd feel more comfortable if people could
> give ideas on various UI things so I can see if I can patch it... I'm
> not a UI expert (and I'm colorblind so that's really not my primary
> area) but I like graphical programming since that the more visible.

Wow, great to hear that!

There is plenty of stuff that got described for the Notes, but only a
subset has been implemented that time. And, sometimes the Notes
implementation lacks some "love to detail" concerning the visuals. One
minor example: the ideas by Michael won't work that well, since there is
still the annoying behavior that Notes are shown in solid color when
being edited.

Another (randomly picked) example is the proper visualization of
scrollbars that is currently missing - it just looks ugly today. Here is
the proposed design (more details in the Wiki):
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/w/images/f/fe/Notes2_ScrollbarsInsideNotes_NotesWindowsExample.png

However, I'd like to provide some pointers to the Notes stuff - it's
really worth spending some time digging through some of the descriptions
(in my point-of-view). I think this is better than pre-process most of
the stuff, since I'm unaware of your likings :-)

The notes main wiki page (Notes2 because of the CWS that time):
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Notes2

Here are the links to the detailed designs that had (sometimes) to be
adapted due to technical constraints nobody spent the time for:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Notes2#Status_and_Proposals

And once finished with the default stuff, we have lots of further ideas:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Notes2_OtherIdeas


Personally, I've already spend over one year with the Notes project
being the UX representative, so I'd like to work with you on that - if
you like :-)

To get some idea who I am and what we did that time, here is a
presentation I've prepared for the OOoCon 2008:
http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008/programme/friday_1397.pdf

>  As
> I said you earlier, I really think some design guys should provide
> mockups to implement, maybe we should have a place appart from the
> bugzilla to allow people to report UI/UX improvments. UI is a very
> important thing now that LO as strong bases, we shouldn't neglect it.

If you are generally interested in working on Usability / Visual Design
topics (of course, from the developer's point-of-view - and we really
need some understanding and support here), feel invited to subscribe to
the Design Team mailing list - some more information can be found here:
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design


Although we grow more slowly than the overall successful development
team (*g*), there are quite a few capable Usability/UX guys on the
list ... and also some great visual designers.

[...]

Enjoy your day!

Christoph