Re: [libreoffice-design] Re: More general stuff
Le Wed, 09 Mar 2011 18:58:00 +1100,
Nik n...@tdf.nikashsingh.com a écrit :
Hi Christoph, all,
Oh boy. I thought I'd wait a few days before responding so that I
wasn't as offended as I am now,
but it looks like you're expecting something from me and I don't want
to delay Sebastien's work.
Hi,
No that's fine, I'll wait for you, I've to implement shadows in impress
et draw and once done I could integrate your work easily since I'd know
where is the code I need to modify. Let's first start with simple
shadow and once we've agreed on a design (borders count, blur and
color), I apply the patch that integrates it.
If you read the full thread, we're currently in the state you where
proposing (I'd propose having a drop shadow by default and having the
option to turn it off, or turn it 'flat', we don't have the flat
option right know, I don't know if having that much options for
something as simple as a shadow ('cause I don't think final users would
have any idea of the work behind that shadow) is a good thing).
The shadow color and width can be easily modified by anybody that has a
master build (3 images to change in a .zip and on value in the
appearancedialog) to allow finding right values. Again, I'm not a
design guy so my opinion about this is rather useless, that's why I
took some hours to implement configuration to allow you to play with it
and come with good value.
[...]
Personally, I would have preferred
you to move on to some other fun / high-impact win, rather than
getting bogged down in random details here ;-)
Please don't expect anything from me. I won't be contributing to this
task further.
I don't volunteer my free time to be told how unimportant Design
random details are.
I don't think Michael intention was to hurt anybody, emails have this
drawback that nuances are not correctly rendered.
Someone else will pick it up. Good luck.
I sincerely hope that you'll change your mind and provide a good mockup
(maybe with a gradient background too, shadows have an alpha channel so
we can put anything behind).
-Nik
Sébastien
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[libreoffice-design] local teams branding usage
hi guys, do you think it's possible have something like a branding adaptation to identify each local team in a unique visual way within branding guidelines. regards --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ Escuelas Libres :: Porque la educación es mucho mejor cuando es libre http://www.escuelaslibres.org.ar/ --- Para entrenar, cualquier programa sirve. Para educar, sólo Software Libre. (Federico Heinz) --- -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to design+h...@libreoffice.org List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/design/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***
Re: [libreoffice-design] Re: [PUSHED] fdo#31251 - Improve default page layout
Hi Björn, all, Bjoern Michaelsen schrieb: Hi Michael, Christoph, designers and developers [...] However, it is a such a common issue, that it even has a name Parkinson's Law of Triviality or colour of the bikeshed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality So we should not be ashamed that it happens, only be prepared to handle it well. For developers this means that you cant make everybody happy and you should not dispair if not everybody loves your implementation on first sight. I agree with you that the design modification here is an example of lower priority. But the way one of the main developer seems to disregard non-coding community members is independent from this question. This is nearly the same position Oracle developers showed when handling proposals and requests by the rest of the community. I can't stand this attitude any longer - sorry. Best regards Bernhard -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to design+h...@libreoffice.org List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/design/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***
Re: [libreoffice-design] Re: More general stuff
[Preamble: After finishing this mail, I've noticed Bernhard's reply concerning the same topic. I'll send this mail anyway ... I hope you don't mind.] Hi all, especially Nik! First and foremost: sigh. I had hoped to avoid that kind of situation that some more people get upset ... I wasn't in the best mood yesterday as well. Why? Yesterday, it seemed to me that Michael wanted to protect Sébastien who initially sent in the patch for the nice shadows. Michael mentioned and our design guys apparently emit a long stream of complaining left and right. And this - to me - is a completely wrong estimation. This wouldn't matter to me, if ... a) Michael wouldn't be one of the lead developers that have quite some impact on the dev list. In my point-of-view, it's essential that he understands the collaboration with the Design Team. b) Michael would read the Design list, hence knowing what great stuff tends to happen here. But, it's clear to me that this isn't manageable to him time-wise ... since he really brings LibreOffice forward, there was a need to correct his perception on the dev list. c) I know from experience that it is hard for people not following a list like Design for some time, that there is some vivid but meaningful process behind the discussions. To be honest, I'm a bit allergic concerning statements that sound uninformed, like the one above :-\ Therefore I tried (and it seems that it partly failed) to convey in my mail that there is some time needed, and the different arguments and preferences have to be sorted out first. And, Nik, I remembered your offer to draft a mockup based on the discussions and therefore mentioned it. Because I wanted to highlight that people on the design list do care - by working iteratively, not by complaining. Thus, I'm very sorry if my mail was the reason for you to get upset :-( Am Mittwoch, den 09.03.2011, 09:29 +0100 schrieb Sébastien Le Ray: Le Wed, 09 Mar 2011 18:58:00 +1100, Nik n...@tdf.nikashsingh.com a écrit : Hi Christoph, all, Oh boy. I thought I'd wait a few days before responding so that I wasn't as offended as I am now, but it looks like you're expecting something from me and I don't want to delay Sebastien's work. As I said, I'm sorry if you perceived any pressure from my side ... I didn't think about any due date or such stuff, rather mentioned your proposal. My aim was to say, that design work matters - as well as the contribution by Sébastien. Sébastien - to mention that: I still haven't had the chance to try your improvements (and will answer this in another mail), but its exceptional that somebody invests the effort to provide such live prototyping. In the projects I work in (e.g. in my day job), it usually costs hours to the whole team to do that for stuff that requires even more attention. So thanks a lot! [...] Personally, I would have preferred you to move on to some other fun / high-impact win, rather than getting bogged down in random details here ;-) Please don't expect anything from me. I won't be contributing to this task further. I don't volunteer my free time to be told how unimportant Design random details are. I don't think Michael intention was to hurt anybody, emails have this drawback that nuances are not correctly rendered. True, but I also think that Michael requires some more understanding that - qualitatively - visual design development (usability, user experience design) differs from code development. But the amount of work is as tough as code development (he sometimes seems to miss that ...). Someone else will pick it up. Good luck. I sincerely hope that you'll change your mind and provide a good mockup (maybe with a gradient background too, shadows have an alpha channel so we can put anything behind). Same hope from my side, because of his excellent skills - but, of course, Nik is free to chose. Regards, Christoph -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to design+h...@libreoffice.org List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/design/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***
Re: [Libreoffice] [libreoffice-design] General relationship between coders and designers (was: [PUSHED]fdo#31251...)
Le Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:11:19 +0100, Bernhard Dippold bernh...@familie-dippold.at a écrit : Hi Michael, all, Hi, Reply inline :-) (don't fear scrolling even if you do not see any answer for some time) At first I want to thank Sébastien not only for his work, but also for being open to the discussion here, even if this means to delay the final inclusion of his patch. I don't care about the delay of inclusion (the only fear I have is my hard drive failing with hours of non pushed work :-) ). Discussion is a good thing and I hope it won't be broken because of misunderstandings. I tried to calm down for more than one day by now, but as Michael repeated his position, I have to reply now. Sorry for not being able to react as positive as Christoph - perhaps I didn't spend enough time in UX/UI to learn to live with this kind of disappointment. *Short version:* If Michael (as one of the most relevant developer in our community) is right with attitude against non-coding contributors and if this is the official position of the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation, I will not keep on spending my spare time and dedication to this open source project any more. Again, I don't think that Michael wanted to hurt anyone's feeling. I strongly believe that LO have to take into account user feedback about usability and design, so I'm pleased to have discussion with design people. Interaction is a good thing. When coders are allowed and encouraged to do their changes regardless of the voting of the relevant experts in areas their code contribution touches, we come back to a two-class community where the broader community is not involved in decisions taken by non-experts but influencing the entire community and it's public standing. Thing is, the original bug report provided a 4 borders mockup, I quickly implemented it (minus some display glitches that were not fixed, they're present in stable LO version but are not this visible since the shadow is thin and opaque), and when I show it to some people everybody was suprised that the shadow was on 4 borders (the 5 people who saw the screenshot told me that there should be only 2 borders). Here this is my fault, I didn't knew that the design team had a mailing list (which seem to take 8 hours to deliver mails into my inbox), if I had, I would have posted the screenshot here to get more feedback. I apologize for that and didn't thought it would go that far. I will no longer be part of such a community. As I said to Nick, I hope that my apologies will make you change your mind. I have very bad taste regarding design (as a vast majority of developers), so I fully trust design team opinion when it's given. *Long version:* Michael Meeks schrieb: Hi Sebastien, On Tue, 2011-03-08 at 09:09 +0100, Sébastien Le Ray wrote: this simple shadow patch has generated a long discussion on Libreoffice-design. Some people don't like the color, some people don't like the amount of blur, some people want no shadow at all, some people want a 4 borders shadow. You're right about the different personal feelings, but they are not a decision of the LibreOffice Design Team. For a developer interested in working on a certain topic it would be easier to get a final voting like The Design Team asks you to add a 8 px wide blurred shadow in grey transparency to all borders of the document. If the zoom factor reduces the space between two sheets to less than 16px, the overlapping areas of the shadow should be cut off. This should apply to every area of LibreOffice, where document borders are visible, namely Writer, Impress, Draw, XML forms [others not yet searched for]. But such a specification is necessarily a result of some kind of discussion, if there is no single decision maker. As we don't want such single person decisions, this list is talkative. I perfectly understand and agree with that. That's why I made the second patch (which gave me headache), I wanted that people who *know* about design could test their feeling on real use cases rather than trying to get something out of Gimp/Photoshop. And that's why I said several times that he would be nice if some people from design team could have a master build so they can test design patches even before they're included. So here is a second patchset that tries to address the first three critics : I hope you understand now, that the comments have not been meant as critics, but as part of the decision making process in the Design Team. Sorry, english isn't my mothertong and critics was maybe too strong, it had to be understood as remarks I guess… Perhaps we need a different way to interact with developers, keeping them out of our processes and coming back to them with the results. This could be the relevant bug-report, a mail on the developer list or any other structure. I disagree. I think having a developer may help design guys to have
Re: More general stuff (was: Re: [libreoffice-design] Re: [PUSHED] fdo#31251 - Improve default page layout)
Hi Sébastien! Am Mittwoch, den 09.03.2011, 07:57 +0100 schrieb Sébastien Le Ray: Does one of you have a test build of LibreOffice or do you use released versions only? Since I'm going to make some more modifications to the design, I think this would be easier for us if some of the design team members had a master build to test modifications and give feedbacks. Screenshots are not always the best way to get a good feeling. To be honest, I'm currently relying on released versions. I heard that it is planned to establish nightly builds, but I fear this work isn't finished. I also know that there is some tinderbox, but - again, as far as I know - it just continuously checks for compiler issues. At OOo, we could use buildbots to create installsets on demand for certain Child Workspaces. So, do you know another kind of access to the master build? Or is there the need to build it on our side ... personally, I have a VM installation to run any Linux build (usually betas). Might this help somehow? Mmh, it seems I delayed investigation on that issue a bit too long ... Thanks for your help! Cheers, Christoph -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to design+h...@libreoffice.org List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/design/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***
Re: [libreoffice-design] Design Team Kick-Off Step 4: Organizing our Work (... causing some work for you *g*)
Hi, Le 04/03/11 23:58, Christoph Noack a écrit : I've created a new wiki page for that - please feel free to add your thoughts. I also provided a more extensive introduction and a proposal for the text steps along with some roughly guessed times: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Kick-Off/WhatWeNeed#Introduction Any further thoughts on that topic? Speak up, please. This is your project! :-) I just took some time to add some proposals in this page. (feel free to move text if necessary) Michel -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to design+h...@libreoffice.org List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/design/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***
Re: [libreoffice-design] Re: [PUSHED] fdo#31251 - Improve default page layout
Hi Bernhard, On Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:16:48 +0100 Bernhard Dippold bernh...@familie-dippold.at wrote: Hi Björn, all, Bjoern Michaelsen schrieb: Hi Michael, Christoph, designers and developers [...] However, it is a such a common issue, that it even has a name Parkinson's Law of Triviality or colour of the bikeshed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality So we should not be ashamed that it happens, only be prepared to handle it well. For developers this means that you cant make everybody happy and you should not dispair if not everybody loves your implementation on first sight. I agree with you that the design modification here is an example of lower priority. Priority is not the point. Please have a look at that wiki page. It is more about that this (most small design issues) are something most people have an opinion about, regardless of if they are designers, developers, both or neither. But the way one of the main developer seems to disregard non-coding community members is independent from this question. No, I dont think that it is correct to put it that way: This is _not_ an developer/nondeveloper issue. We currently have a very open model for contributors on master and as I understand it, we want to keep it that way to allow others to join in easily -- this is one of the foundations of TDF/LO. This is not only the case for design issues, but for all topics. If somebody has something he thinks of as a great improvement, he can commit that to master. If it breaks stuff, it will be reverted. If it improves stuff, even if it does not make things perfect it stays in. If there is a plan how to make things even better, that of course should be done -- but you will not ever force volunteers to do it. It just wont work (unless you pay them). Nobody -- developer or nondeveloper -- should be able to block anybody from doing a Good Thing(tm), just because he wants a Better Thing(tm). And dont think that developers are so much more special than nondevelopers: Even if I had twenty fulltime developers at my disposal (in addition to myself), I would not get everything done I would love to see changed. There is always more. I see commits fly by every day that I would have done different. But the only relevant question is: Is it at least better than before?. From your other mail: For a developer interested in working on a certain topic it would be easier to get a final voting like The Design Team asks you to add a 8 px wide blurred shadow in grey transparency to all borders of the document. If the zoom factor reduces the space between two sheets to less than 16px, the overlapping areas of the shadow should be cut off. This should apply to every area of LibreOffice, where document borders are visible, namely Writer, Impress, Draw, XML forms [others not yet searched for]. I am afraid you are very wrong there. It is not at all easier -- it is a lot harder -- and a lot less fun (the stuff that motivates volunteers). To give you a car analogy (which are always broken, but anyway), the statement above would be like telling a taxi driver not where you want to go, but which route to take, when to changes lanes, when to go faster or slower and when to change gears. You can do that with a taxi driver, but he likely will not like it. You better should not try it with a driver, who volunteered to get you where you wanted to go. On the first ride, you should mostly just go along with what he does (unless he drives you of a cliff). Before the second ride, prepare to suggest improvements to him. If he is a reasonable guy, he will listen to you -- esp. if you have a record of being right about these things. Best Regards, Bjoern -- https://launchpad.net/~bjoern-michaelsen -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to design+h...@libreoffice.org List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/design/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***
Re: [libreoffice-design] Re: More general stuff
Hello, Where is going LibreOffice? I think it is pointless to argue now about shadow or whatever. First thing whta we need to do is to make future design of LibreOffice, one and only mockup, where developers can look how it should look alike and then take their decisions. And I think that should be our next goal. What point it is to make 2 or 4 sided shadow now if we don't know where LibreOffice is going. Some mockup/design examples: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Renaissance/Design_Proposals_for_%E2%80%9CAccessing_Functionality%E2%80%9D#Design_Proposals_Submitted http://pauloup.deviantart.com/gallery/28216273 http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/libre_office_ribbon_mockup_by_usrnametaken-d375abm.png http://t6uni.deviantart.com/art/OOo-mockup-181260508 Other examples: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Selection_0212.png http://www.vistax64.com/attachments/vista-news/13041d1243273201-office-2010-technical-preview-screenshots-win7-7127.jpg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsMD9QCiMtgfeature=player_embedded If we don't do this, then it is taking much more time developers to make things work. (And a lot of people have told me that they don't use OpenOffice/LibreOffice beacuase they don't like how it looks.) Thanks, Hillar -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to design+h...@libreoffice.org List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/design/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***
[libreoffice-design] Re: Linux / Gnome-Shell high-res icons ...
Hi Caolán, all! Am Mittwoch, den 09.03.2011, 08:51 + schrieb Caolán McNamara: On Tue, 2011-03-08 at 15:51 -0500, Jon McCann wrote: On Tue, 2011-03-08 at 00:02 +0100, Christoph Noack wrote: We're deprecating with the intent of eliminating the use of GtkStatusIcons (the notification area). So there are things like: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31206 The quickstarter thing that lives there isn't enabled by default out-of-the-box anymore on a fresh install, though of we still honour the setting if it was previously enabled. I'm not sure if we want a sort of if we're running under GNOME3 then forget about it kind of thing. If we aim for platform conformance and it would be still manageable code-wise, the Gnome 3 specific handling would be fine. Based on a discussion with the (Oracle) UX team some time ago, they even added some features (the drop-down to starts the applications) because of the high demand, although this disregards user-interface guideline rules. So, assumption, there is at least some request for that on other platforms. The best way would be to check how many people activate the option afterwards (if not inherited from previous installations) and decide whether it could be removed completely. But, without proper usage statistics its hard to say whether to remove it completely (lacking real user data). Otherwise, some more guessing ;-) We're also have new guidelines for notifications (libnotify type). Do you use those at all? No I don't think so, though I had wondered previously if we should run our help warnings (like the first time autocorrection changes something for you it tells you about it and how to disable it if you want) through the notification area. So guidelines on if that's a really stupid idea would be helpful :-) You mean re-routing the HelpAgent messages? From what I can see, libnotify is rather used for messages by applications currently not having the focus (or being a daemon, service), or to communicate overall system messages. With regard to these cases, the one notifications that might benefit would be the update available message - on Windows ;-) This might change for deeper integration with CMS. Caolán, the autocorrection stuff is a special case (and currently also discussed on Design). It is highly related the place of the change, therefore an in-place message would be desirable here (and for some more cases) to solve some more issues (how to revert once / for this document / ever). I've started a page covering some of these some years ago, by refining some behavior within MS Office (a bit outdated ow): http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Experience/DirectManipulationSnippets http://people.gnome.org/~jclinton/libreoffice-modal-dialogs.png Other things to note in that screenshot are: * the button order is incorrect for use in GNOME. The Print button should be at the right side. Mind you, for the print dialog at least, a lot of these problems would go away if/when we use the native gtk print dialog there. *cough*, dtardon was poking at that a while ago, but I think that slipped off the radar. Jon, thanks for the hints. Although it doesn't make it better, some explanation - the effort of UI changes within LibreOffice ist still very high. So the guys at Sun/Oracle decided to use a style that works somehow on all the platforms - do once, use several times. Maybe, with a slight preference for Windows (the majority of users worked with OOo on Windows). Any further word on that will result in Marketing requirements :-) For example, this UI decision causes the additional lines (usually a replacement for group boxes, or their Gnome spacing and indention equivalents). Currently, LibreOffice is a less than ideal cocktail of different ingredients (e.g. platform specific keybindings, platform unspecific dialog design). So, with regard to the dialogs, we'll need a layout manager that is capable to take care of buttons and other layout issues. And as far as I know, the guys within this thread starting working on that quite some time ago (and maybe will ...). Any further comments (mac like sheets, menu and button mnemonics, ...) may be answered by the developers. I'm unsure how this relates to our implementation. In general, this would be helpful for all our supported platforms. Jon, I think your input is very helpful since it still emphasizes the need for a proper long-term perspective for LibreOffice (target user bases, preferred platform, ...). And I'll think about how to further improve the situation within Gnome ... Thanks and enjoy your day ... now I have to hurry up, or I miss my day job duties ;-) Cheers, Christoph -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to design+h...@libreoffice.org List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/design/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***
