Proposal by Juan Canham

Design Proposal [linked sections]

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The following design proposal is part of the collection of design proposals for “Accessing Functionality”, which is part of Project Renaissance.

Summary and Status

Instead of providing a fixed layout, providing a framework to allow users to setup a wide variety of setups to suit thier needs. Additionally the most popular setups can then be shipped with openoffice to work around the fact that different use cases use different setups (e.g a person who mainly reads documents doesn't want much screen estate wasted on toolbars, but a user who mainly formats will need his tools visable most of the time)

Status: WIP.. only read about the project today, is the deadline GMT?

After you consider the comments and questions in the comments section, revise your proposal for completeness and understandability. When you feel your proposal is ready for evaluation, please change the status above to “Proposal Complete”.

Mockup

Apologies for the poor quality of the mock up, the idea is best described in the below text, but here is a simple image representing the extremes a customizable system can go to. e.g

These are quick mock ups as this idea is mainly to do with the toolbar and not OO Impress specific. An important ommision is that the active toggle would be highlighted. e.g in the example the Text icon should be highlighted.

Detailed Description

• Menubar: Replace the main menubar with a menubutton, use this to show all menu items buttons that aren't shown by menu buttons that are spread on the toolbar as individual items (provide buttons for all menu items but only include some by default)
• Permanent toolbar, some actions can be done from any situation (copy/paste/undo,etc) these items should be placed on a permanent toolbar
• Bind keys,buttons to toggle whats in the "container"
• Make the whole thing customizable (if the relevant buttons are to big to fit in the provided space that section should be the first to lose space) and allow users to define their own "containers" (allow repeated buttons) and their own triggers to put these into the "container"
• Allow the different sections to be separated (like current toolbars)
• Allow different toolbars to use different sized icons (and some to include text while other dont)
• Providing too much customization is not a bad thing as long as most people can use the defaults.
• Provide an easy&safe way to save/share a "theme" (There is no point in doing research designing what you thing is a good compromise for the work load that office/home users put their suite through, when you can just put a version out there and see what people do with it )

I'm not a presentation expert so my "containers" are just rough guesses:

Text - For all your text formatting needs

Image - For adding images and editing them

Object - For adding boxes/cricles/3d boxes/etc and editing them

Layout - For editing the slide layout, (the container would default to this when no object/image is selected)

Document - For making changes that affect the entire document save as (save would be in the permanently visible set of buttons)/print/email/export ect

• Dynamic behavior: When the set of icons in the container is changed, via toggle buttons, keyboard shortcut or selection of a different media, a transformation takes place (fade out one set and fade in another seams like a logical transition but its not overly important)
• Explain the rationale and assumptions:There are several different groups that have strong opinions on UI. I believe there will be 4 sets of people who all want different things in a UI (old fashioned, minimalist, fancy and microsoft clone) and while there wants are not mutually exclusive it is impossible to satisfy them all with a single design. While the framework is not a large departure form what can already be done in openoffice, providing "containers" allows 3 groups to produce their ideal UIs while leaving fans of the classic look happy (they can put all their buttons in the permanent container.
• alternatives:The replacing of the menubar with a single button is a bold move, and its very important for an application to fit in with an OS, while i think including a menubar button is a good idea across all OSs, it may be appropriate to not enable it by default on macs.
• Idea: To allow easier customization of the toobars & containers a firefox-like UI could replace the current menu customization system. However this is not essential as the current customization system works well, all that needs to be added is the ability to add container toggling buttons.

Comments

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Your space :-)