User Experience/UI ideas

For a pretty long time, we've been discussing a possible new UI. We've had several suggestions and mock-ups, like the one of user JaronBaron or the FLUX UI, and discussed those lightly, but that's as far as we have gotten. Rather than trying to summarize all of a single user's suggestions into one and critiquing it separately, it seems more logical to create a list of UI ideas from which a new UI can arise. (We should also keep in mind the UI elements of competing software.) Please discuss these elements under the "Discussion" tab.

Direct Manipulation Snippets

See here for a detailed description

Styles button

As suggested by Leonard Mada: "Instead of fonts, I would probably add a "Styles"-button: [in the left-most corner of the toolbar]

• less space occupied than the list-box
• when pressed (or hovered), it should open a small window, stacked to the left-margin, which contains:
  • frequently used styles, grouped by: heading, body-text, other
  • list of styles used in the document
  • the font-list (a more advanced one)
  • further formatting options

Users will have a more useful touch to styles, and would be able to change the styles attributes where they need it: within styles!

And it would add consistency to their documents / increase the use of styles / increase awareness of styles / move toward automatic styling."

Menu and help item search

A searchbox that would search through menu and help items, much like that in Mac OS X Leopard (under the help menu).

Chrome-like title bar

I recently tried Google Chrome and once its Mac counterpart is released, it will become my default browser. The UI innovations in Chrome are commendable and should definitely stand as an example. So here's my Chrome-based idea: a tabbed title bar with tabs that can be dragged out. There would be slight differences: I'd suggest a save button next to the title when the document is unsaved (instead of a "*" like some other apps have) and "open" and "new" buttons on the right (open would be a split button, with the down arrow showing recent documents OR a button opening a new tab which would stand as an open dialog). The document icon next to the title in the tab bar could open a menu with "Save as...", "Print", and other document-related commands, now that we're looking into ways of getting rid of the menu bar.

History sidebar

The idea is a sidebar showing action history, much like the history sidebar in Firefox, only with actions (or the history panel in design applications, only made into a sidebar). The unique idea here is that there could have several columns (the sidebar would be resizable horizontally) for those times when one undoes a few things, then changes something, but then wants to come back to what he had before he undid anything.