Hi André, thanks for your comments.
André Wyrwa wrote: >> - if yes, should we automatically group by application? > > Nope. Grouping by application represents a coder point of view. From a > user point of view there isn't much purpose in it. On the other hand, > grouping by project or grouping by workflow would be of good use. But > this isn't quite doable automatically, except if combined with some kind > of project management implementation (which would be a beneficial > addition - for later on or so). Nonetheless, i imagine there would be > possibilities to aid grouping by project. IBTD. It have been especially the users that wanted the "application" like behavior of our modules (Writer, Calc). Developers or "power users" wouldn't like to group tabs application wise, but they are a minority. Be sure that grouping tabs application wise is exactly what most users (especially those used to other office programs) will ask us for. So it is necessary to discuss this point sufficiently before considering to put something out. >> - how should the UI be changed to support explicit creation of new windows? > > - "Open Document in new window...", "Open Document in new Tab..." > - "Send Document to new window...", "Send Document to new Tab..." Yes, that's the obvious idea. But unfortunately it's not enough. You know that there are gazillions of places in OOo that create a new window? Should we convert them all to create tabs instead? Should they still create new windows? Or should we double each and every menu entry, tool bar button etc.? I doubt that we should do the latter. But exactly this brings us back to my question. > - Ideally, drag a tab out of the window to create a new window. You must be a former user of the StarOffice desktop. :-) This was one of the really good parts of it. But there's more about window management with tabs (see below). > - How flexible is ODF metadata and the extension system? Would it be > possible to save a tag with each document, telling it which "window > group" it belongs to? Of course, this suggests creating some kind of > management for window groups. I wouldn't spoil the document meta data (meta.xml) with view information. This is something for the ViewSettings (settings.xml). We already store some window related things into it (like the window size). But storing such sophisticated view information is not easy. From several years of experience with data like this I can say that storing such infomation only works in one context: > - Most gorgeous would be something like a "Save/Load session" feature. Exactly this one. This is comparably easy to implement. But it will be like opening a can of worms to think about storing information about particular assignments of documents to windows inside the single documents. Not worth the effort IMHO. > It would allow to save "projects" rather than documents. Yes. BTW that is not related to tabs, the same could be done with the current windows. And in fact we have this feature as part of the autorecovery or the "session save on logout". Offering this as a user option would be doable. >> - how can users understand the difference between the new document tabs >> and the existing tabs e.g. in Calc and Impress? > > One idea would be vertical tabs, but that has issues. > A probably better approach would be the combination of some other ways: > - Make document tabs look different than "page" tabs. > - Include a mime-type icon on each tab. This also adds further usability > improvement. > - Place the tabs above the toolbar (although i wouldn't advice that, > really). > Ideally, if combined with a means of project management, there could be > a vertical docked window (like the styles list) that lists the projects > documents. This way no tabbar would be needed at all and further > benefits would apply. But i know of course that that's a whole different > story. Thanks for your suggestions. I will make sure that we will not forget them. There's another area that has not been touched until now. While we are at it ... :-) Many years ago we already had such a "tabbed" interface in StarOffice4.3 (it was more like a design study to be honest). The user feedback was very negative as it didn't contain an important feature: it was impossible to show two documents in one window beneath each other, as you could do in the MDI interface that was quite common at that time. This design flaw also exists in current "tabbed" applications like Firefox. You always have to create a new window and arrange them on your desktop, but this is not what we should aim for. This is worse than now with our SDI type interface as the waste of screen space is even bigger because of the additional tab bar. It should be possible to show the content of two tabs of a window at once, the containing window becoming either horizontally or vertically split. I don't think that we need more than two but that isn't a fundamental difference. I also don't think that we need "staggered" windows as in MDI. Unfortunately we have to do some code work to be able to support the multiple tabs view. Before that is finished I wouldn't like to release this as a feature. Ciao, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS Please don't reply to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
