Minutes of the Design Hangout: 2015-12-11

[Jan Holesovsky]

* Present: Heiko, Kendy, Samuel, Stuart, Tomaž

* UI changes integrated the last week:

    + Kill destructive color conversion menu in Impress (Tomaž)
    + ToolbarAsMenu controller in reportdesign (Maxim)
    + Displaymode icons (Andreas)
    + Improved toolbars (Jay)
    + Breeze icons improvements (Andreas)
    + Fix tooltips for frame alignment buttons (Samuel)

+ Save button behavior (Samuel)

    + Save contains "Save as" and "Save remote" in a dropdown
    + Dropdown was disabled when "Save" was disabled
        -> Made the button dropdown only when save disabled https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/20079/
    + However, this is quite irritating (button has two different modes, user doesn't know why he can't click save and later he can)
    + Also users missing indication whether document is saved
    + possible solutions:
        + make only the dropdown active
        + move the functionality to Save As
    + what do you want from that button? (Heiko)
        + is there a good reason to disable Save in the first place? (Heiko)
            + we already have a user setting to enable Save all the time (Kendy)
    + moving to Save As is a problem: wanted to hide it in the default toolbar
    + Save status is in the status bar too (Kendy)
        + not many people know about that though (Heiko)
        + the information could be in the tooltip; even with additional info (Document is saved / Document is modified / ...) (Kendy) +1 (Stuart)
        + eg. MSO has that enabled all the time (Samuel)
        + additional / new icon indicator in the toolbar for that - disabled by default (Heiko)
        + icon that looks disabled, but still clickable (Samuel)
            + that would be confusing (Heiko)
        + possiblity to switch the icon to one with a star when unsaved changes? (Kendy)
            + decoration / small star
            + like it (Heiko)

    + any technical limitations when allowing saving all the time? (Heiko)
        + not that I am aware of (Kendy)
    + conclusion:
        + implement switching of the Save icon to a "Document has changes" state
            + decorator, like an added star (Andreas promised to take a look, at least for Breeze)
        + enable Save always
        + remove the configuration setting to disable the Save button (because it would be confusing when the user switches to "disabling")
        + hide the Save As from the toolbar
        + Samuel will talk to Maxim, let's still try to get this in as a late feature

+ Navigator in Impress & Draw (Samuel)

    + What to do with "Show Navigator when Slideshow running"?
    + there is a possibility to have the navigator visible during presenting (Samuel)
        + but that's the point of the presenter console (Samuel)
        + would like to remove this feature (Samuel)
    + does not even work in my 5.0 :-) (Kendy)
        + looks unused / nobody misses this feature apparently (Samuel / all)
    + keep in mind that people wanted the use case the separate window for navigator in Writer (Stuart)
    + conclusion:
        + let's remove the "Navigator visible" from Slide Show -> Slide Show Settings...
        + if there is a missing functionality, let's find out the exact use case, and add to the presenter console
        + EasyHack created for this: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=96414

+ Mail merge toolbar (Kendy)

    + current problem: in the Mail Merge Wizard, the document state switches between the "Source" and "Target" view
        + confuses users a lot
    + proposed to drop the last 3 screens from the mail merge wizard
    + instead put this functionality to a toolbar, that has
        + Mail Merge Wizard (for changes in the address settings etc)
        + back and forth for navigation
        + skip recipient
        + Edit Individual Documents...
        + Print (range)
        + e-mail (range)
    + conclusion: sounds good
        + will share the prototype when I get there (Kendy)

* Suggestions from Roland (Samuel)

    + http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/libre-office-vs-numbers-td4167428.html

    + Roland now bootstrapped, let's see (Samuel)
    + we can close this topic for now

* Table styles blog post (Heiko)

    + shared a draft
    + needs a bit of discussion too unfortunately (Heiko)
        + discussed it in the call (Kendy/Heiko)
    + Heiko will finish the draft & publish

* Start Center GUI suggestions for change (Stuart)

    + there were some new proposals about the start center (Stuart)
    + thanks so much for thinking in the new ways
        + sharing only a screenshot is not enough though
        + when considering a big change, more communication is needed - encourage to
          join the #libreoffice-design, and discuss there

    + https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=96383
        + Change Start Screen - kompilainenn's
        + very concise, tabbed GUI -- maybe an alternate to current thumbnail based (Stuart)
        + would force us to re-implement the file browser in LibreOffice (Kendy)
            + we already have an own implementation, but that would have to be largery re-done
            + platform-native dialogs are preferred (Kendy)
        + conclusion: not for the moment
    + http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Fwd-New-Interface-suggestion-tc4169017.html
        + New Interface suggestion - Douglas Vigliazzi
        + MDI-like approach (Heiko)
            + having more documents in one app was abandoned years ago (Heiko)
            + browsers do it, kind of (Stuart)
            + but browsers have much less functionality than document editing etc. (Kendy)
            + problem with just moving stuff to the sidebar without more general changes (Heiko)
        + conclusion: thanks for the suggestion, but for the time being - we are not going to follow this path

* Bug discussions

    + https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=NEEDINFO&component=ux-advise&list_id=527515&query_format=advanced&resolution=---
 
    + discussed, and acted on:
        + https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86085
        + https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86303