Difference between revisions of "UI Layout"

Revision as of 21:08, 30 January 2007

Contributors

• Mox Soini: Mox

Introduction and History

This page concerns itself with current and possible future UI Layout in OpenOffice.org, meaning the code methods and file formats used to programmatically create the locations, style and contents of Graphical User interface - the buttons, text boxes, toolbars, menus, dialogs etc.

Historically the UI layout has been hard-coded in individual applications (Writer, Impress, Calc etc.). Later this evolved into slightly de-coupled with the creation of VCL. While VCL makes porting easier for different platforms, such as Linux and Mac OS X, it also makes it very hard to get platform specific features and style into the UI. Some of this difficulty was lessened by the introduction (Since march 2003) of Native Widget Framework, which allows to glue the native widgets (e.g. the blue buttons in Mac OS X) over the OpenOffice.org's default widgets. This is accomplished by copying the look of the native button, while the interaction and the "feel" (how the button behaves) are coming from openoffice.org.

Before Native Widget Framework (pre-2003), OpenOffice.org more or less looked like Windows 95 on all platforms. Between 2004-2006 OpenOffice.org has begun to look more like native application, although purely in the look of widgets. The UI Layout (including menu structures, menu labels,

Complementary and Related projects

The possible future UI Layout work is complementary and not overlapping with:

• Graphics Rendering re-work: [Mac_OS_X_Porting_-_Canvas|OOo Canvas]
• [Uno/Effort/Uno_Runtime_Environment|UNO Runtime environment]
• ODF Toolkit and
• OOo Runner Separate Apps on Mac OS X

Goals

UI Examples and Comparison

The following lists the typical applications used on various platforms and the comparison screenshots from OpenOffice.org. The aim is to show that while there are similarities in these platform-specific applications, and much of the actual functionality is quite similar, the actual UI (i.e. how you accomplish those functions) has differences both on surface and in deeper levels.

Comparison between OpenOffice.org and platform-specific UI Layouts
Kword (development version) on Linux. Note the Photoshop-like toolbar/sidebar on the left. Full view		OpenOffice.org 2.0 on Linux. Full view
Latest Microsoft Office on Windows Vista. Note the task oriented layout and the new "Ribbon" menu, also used in Internet Explorer 7. Full view		OpenOffice.org 2.0 on all Windows versions. Full view
Latest Microsoft Office (development version) on Mac OS X. Note the layout and the new "modes" that are remarkably different from Windows version. Full view		OpenOffice.org 2.0 (Aqua development version) on Mac OS X. Full view
Apple's Pages (part of iWork) on Mac OS X. Note the design oriented, very clean layout and the powerful floating "Inspector" -toolbar/toolbox. Full view		OpenOffice.org 2.0 (Aqua development version) on Mac OS X. Full view