Minutes of the Design Hangout: 2016-04-01

kendy · April 1, 2016, 7:54pm

* Present: Akshay, Heiko, Jay, Kendy, Susobhan

* GSoC

+ https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/GSoC/Ideas

    + https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/dashboard/
    + if you are a mentor, please touch the [I want to mentor this] button for projects you like
    + even UX people can mentor / co-mentor, big part of the work is non-technical (Kendy)
        + asking about the status, checking the results from the high-level point of view etc.
        + and a developer can help with the code pointers / review of the code
        + worked well the last year [co-mentoring Jay + Bubli] (Jay)

    + UI Proposals
        + Application Themes
        + Improve The Special Characters Dialogue in LibreOffice
        + Improve user experience with Table Styles (mentors: dev - kendy/miklos(?), ui - )
        + Improving the TOC-dialog
        + Review of the Area Fill dialog (mentors: dev Bubli , ui - )
        + Redesigning the Template Manager (mentors: dev - , ui - )
        + Review of Sidebar and it's functionality (mentors: dev Bubli , ui - )
        + Infrastructure for defining toolbars via .ui (Glade) files (mentors: dev - kendy/samuel)

* Bring back the legacy Save toolbar button as customization option? (Heiko)

+ Maxim sorted this out - thank you!

* Draw-related survey (Heiko)

+ results finished, ready for publishing
+ many good ideas there

* Sidebar survey

+ first results (Heiko)
+ https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Whiteboards/SidebarUsage

    + finished
    + https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XknvPqz58hYc_NeY2-Ky-L92MkLdYqs7SJCCxC3DX6w/edit#heading=h.rwnqe5haxk5v
    + hope to publish it the next week

+ please read it & review, will affect our HIG

* Single Toolbar Mode & Notebookbar (Jay/Kendy)

+ the toolbar for single toolbar mode is in (Jay)

    + notebookbar code changed too (Kendy)
        + now it is possible to have different top-level .ui files in different apps, for example
          notebookbar.ui for Writer (Kendy)
        + would be good to do the single toolbar mode using a .ui file too at some stage, so that we can
          easily hide the 'classic' toolbars in the simplebar or notebookbar cases using the same code (Kendy)

* Help content (Jay)

    + reviewed the xslt approach for now, like that it uses the same filter (with small tweaks)
      as the internal help (Kendy)
        + problem there though with importing from other .xhp files (Jay)
          https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94017
          e.g. https://help.libreoffice.org/Writer/Table - '7.1 Table AutoFormat' should be '8. Table AutoFormat'
        + will look at the PHP approach too (Kendy)

* Blog (Heiko)

+ still badly spammed
+ would be good to have a better anti-spam filter or so on the blog (if possible)

+ can you provide some data about how many people participated in the surveys so far? (Kendy)
+ not that easily, but will try (Heiko)

mikesaunders · April 4, 2016, 11:21am

Hi,

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XknvPqz58hYc_NeY2-Ky-L92MkLdYqs7SJCCxC3DX6w/edit#heading=h.rwnqe5haxk5v
+ hope to publish it the next week
+ please read it & review, will affect our HIG

Good work. Just to say that I've been through it and tidied up the English a bit!

Mike

Wols_Lists · April 5, 2016, 1:38pm

Just seen this - one little comment ...

"Prefer graphical widgets in favor of controls that require the input of
an exact value (e.g. an image’s transparency with discrete steps via
sliders)."

I'm not sure how appropriate it is in these circumstances, but one of
the things that drives me up the wall with guis is how you're forced to
use sliders/mice so much. A graphical widget should have a button that
converts it into an input window - eg I sometimes want to enter colours
as pantones.

Most people are visual. Most people prefer sliders. Just remember that
some of us don't ... That's why I'm a WordPerfect fan - it's so easy
to use an input dialog that plonks things *exactly* where you want them
rather than dragging and hoping you've dropped it in the right place

Cheers,
Wol

Yousuf_Jay_Philips1 · April 11, 2016, 9:24am

Just seen this - one little comment ...

"Prefer graphical widgets in favor of controls that require the input of
an exact value (e.g. an image’s transparency with discrete steps via
sliders)."

I'm not sure how appropriate it is in these circumstances, but one of
the things that drives me up the wall with guis is how you're forced to
use sliders/mice so much. A graphical widget should have a button that
converts it into an input window - eg I sometimes want to enter colours
as pantones.

Most people are visual. Most people prefer sliders. Just remember that
some of us don't ... That's why I'm a WordPerfect fan - it's so easy
to use an input dialog that plonks things *exactly* where you want them
rather than dragging and hoping you've dropped it in the right place

Though we will be introducing more graphical widgets, they will be accompanied by regular input fields that users can view/input the exact value. E.g. the transparency slider and spinbox field in the area content panel.

Cheers,
Wol

Yousuf

Wols_Lists · April 11, 2016, 3:00pm

That's great. It's just that sometimes us text people get forgotten

It would be nice if it's explicitly stated in the guidelines that the
presence of such text-box entry fields should be a MANDATORY option
(where they make sense, of course). It's fine for them to be tucked
away, but they need to be there.

(And I'm minded of a story about MS-Access. Because everything was
visual, this guy thought "hey, you can't visualise this relational
concept. Can you do it in Access? Probably not!" and he was right.
Probably Joe Celko.)

Cheers,
Wol