2011/4/20 Scott Pledger <[email protected]>: > Hi all, this is my first time proposing something to such an important Open > Source project, so I hope I'm doing this correctly. > I've had this idea for a while now and I wanted to see what everyone here > thought of it, so here it goes! > > Its based on two simple premises. First, I noticed that monitors are > getting wider but the documents we type up are still vertically oriented. > Secondly, I find floating toolbars to be extremely cumbersome. So I decided > I'd try to tackle both of these issues in a simple, easy-to-use manner. > Attached to this email is the concept that I currently have (or at least > the beginnings of it). So, here's my plan: > > 1. Have a single toolbar at the top that contains actions that can be > used no matter what application you're using. > 2. Move any additional toolbars to the right hand side and organize them > into groups based on what the user currently has selected. So let's say > you're editing a Writer document and you have some text selected that is in > a Table. You would have 3 primary categories (at the top of the right-hand > part of the screen): Document, Table, and Text. 'Document' is always > present and handles document-wide settings. Table might contain > subcategories of Row, Column, Cell, and Display. All of these would contain > toolbar items to modify aspects of these subcategories. Text then, might > contain Font, Paragraph, and Section as subcategories. And so on and so > forth. I also had the idea that hovering over a primary category or a > subcategory might emphasize what would be affected in the main document area > by shading everything else, but I also know that that would not be a > necessity. For the purposes of the design, this right-hand area can be > called the context tool panel. > 3. Move the menus to the left-hand side, placing them above whatever is > typically the left side of any given LibreOffice application. (Impress/Draw > -> Slides, etc.). Clicking one of these would then cause a panel to be > displayed categorizing items in the same manner as the context tool panel > which would contain the different actions the user can take. > 4. Possibly: Allow for LibreOffice to run everything from a single window > by having a tab row at the top of the screen. (I'm still not sold on this > idea, so let me know what you think.) > > When it came to actually designing this new layout, I tried to pull from the > current LibreOffice icons as much as possible, mainly because I think they > are absolutely awesome! > > Also, I do want to be forthcoming - I'm no UX or Design professional. I'm a > Computer Science major in the US, but I think that this kind of layout can > not only give LibreOffice one of the most unique and (in my mind) usable > User Interfaces on the planet, but I also think that it can help LibreOffice > to be the very best office suite on the planet. Also, let me know if this > was the wrong place to post - like I said, I'm new to this particular > project! > > Thanks! > Scott Pledger >
This mailing list do not allow attachments, so if you sent one we cannot see it ;) The concept you present is quite similar to calligra suite interface: http://www.calligra-suite.org/ which, I agree, has very good concepts and a great potential. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/design/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
