Hello, Here's an idea aimed at helping with the long-standing problem of the huge number of commands, options and menu items in office suites, and their low discoverability. It's more of an adaptation of existing ideas, actually.
Desktop application launchers (Gnome-Do, Katapult, Synapse and their likes) have been around for years and IMHO are a very convenient way of executing applications, launching files and so on. Recently they have gone more mainstream, as Windows 7, Gnome Shell and Unity all have similar functionality built into their interfaces. I think an office suite could benefit from having a similar interface as a way to improve the efficiency of work and the discoverability of the commands and options available to the user, since the traditional menu structure and the newer Ribbon style are both lacking in this. As a first step to implement this idea, I think it might be possible to create an index of the texts in the localization files of LibreOffice, which include all the commands, options and word in dialog boxes that a user might want to execute. Once the index exists, a plug-in can be written to launch a search box that lets the user type what they want to do, search the index for the typed text, show the user a list of items that fit that text and execute the selected item. I don't know how difficult or easy it would be to do this. Maybe the suggested way of implementing this idea is not even possible (I'm actually not sure there is a way to map the indexed words to the actual commands, and if there isn't one, what would it take to create it.) I have to say that I'm not a software developer and I know almost nothing about the structure of LibreOffice. Everything I wrote about the implementation of this idea might be totally wrong. I know that some of the things I talk about don't even belong to this specific mailing list, but I think this is the right place to suggest this idea. I would be very happy to hear your opinions about this idea and if it's worth pursuing. All the best, Oren -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to design+h...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/design/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
