Design/Whiteboards/Accessible insert

Summary
Make insertion commands easily accessible, expecially on touch devices.

Discussion
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Personas

 * Joe: a college student with limited funds. He takes notes on a small netbook. Screen real estate is very important to him -- every pixel counts. Speed of access is also important, as the professor talks quickly and he doesn't have time to stop making notes and customize his toolbars. He wants a toolbar to be hidden when he doesn't need to use it, but he needs to be able to quickly show it when he does.
 * Francine: an artist that gets easily put-off by computers. She gets frustrated when she can't draw a table from the Drawing toolbar. She'd like a single toolbar from which she could insert everything.
 * Dan: a designer used to applications with Tools docked on the left side of the screen, where buttons are easier to click, according to Fitts's law. To work efficiently, he needs a toolbar that takes advantage of Fitts's law.

Tentative Design
This section is created after we've agreed on a single design based on the submitted proposals and are just ironing out the details. It includes the spec and high-quality mockups.

Insert bar
A toolbar containing these commands:
 * Paste
 * Text frame
 * File
 * Table
 * Chart


 * Fields (if within a text field)
 * Special character (if within a text field)
 * Formatting mark (if within a text field)


 * Freeform line
 * Curve
 * Rectangle
 * Ellipse
 * Line
 * Basic shapes
 * Stars
 * Symbol shapes
 * Block arrows
 * Flowcharts
 * Callouts
 * Floating frame
 * Formula
 * OLE object
 * Plug-in
 * Bookmark
 * Comment
 * Cross-reference
 * Script
 * Indexes/Tables
 * Footnote/endnote

Behavior

 * The bar could be shown and hidden either from the View menu or through a button on the left of the status bar.
 * Every button would have the same behavior as its current counterpart (from the drawing toolbar or the Insert menu).
 * What are currently split buttons in the drawing tool bar would become drop-down menus only, as the small arrow on split buttons would be hard to target.
 * The bar would be docked on the left, but could also be docked on the bottom and on the right through the bar's right-click menu.
 * Instead of a "mouse pointer" icon, there is a red "X" icon to get back to standard editing mode. (The "X" denotes the cancellation of the current insertion mode.)
 * This button temporarily replaces the "hide insert bar" button in the status bar, so that it would be quickly accessible according to Fitts's law.
 * On Android devices, a checkbox button on the Action bar would be used instead.
 * The clickable area of all commands on the bar reaches to the left border of the screen, so that all commands are quickly accessible in accordance to Fitts's law.

Design

 * None of the commands are split buttons: they're always either simple buttons or drop-down menus.
 * All icons on the insert bar are monochrome.
 * "Inactive buttons" (i.e. buttons which would change the current mode) are gray
 * To show that a certain insertion mode is active, the "active button" would have a distinctive color and be completely opaque.
 * When rulers are hidden, the bar takes on the application background.