Design/Meetings/2012-06-30

Attendees

 * AlexanderW
 * Astron
 * Mirek2

Log
ive invited the author of shadow intro  AH the other thing was apropos nothing  ok anyway, ive tried to contact the author of shadow intro via deviant art what's shadow intro? thats the splash screen thats currently winning the poll on g+ oh, ok have you seen that btw?  Yes, it's also my favorite okay. i dont like it so much tbh, because its so incredibly colourful I like it design-wise, though I'd still prefer a much simpler one since the splash is an indicator, not art  the rounded corners seem a bit superfluous hm ... andrea (the author) hasn't written back on da.com – maybe he wont come then :( I agree actually i think theyre a nice touch but somehow inconsistent because the other corners cant be rounded (alpha transparency limitation) okay... so what's on the list of topics today? icons for the template dialog? * splash screens and associated stuff * templates *templates dialogue okay? sure let's start with the splashes then right what do we need to discuss? okay, i guess it's pretty clear that we need to decide between minty and shadow intro... and clean otherwise, we're completely ignoring the poll and that wouldn't be good  agree so, i am not too happy that minty has made it so far ... it gets more awful every time i see it... is there a reason why we shouldn't choose shadow intro? yes. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/Branding#Branding if you take a look at what our supposed branding language is supposed to be, #2 balanced has imo been pretty much disrespected here. I disagree I wouldn't say these are "extreme coloring nor intensive surface shining effects" it's quite smooth, not extreme it's pretty bright green, that seems extreme to me it's a simple gradient I wouldn't say it's extreme it doesn't hurt the eyes it feels warm and welcoming if you read the coments for the splash, some people feel that it does hurt the eyes (theyre directly next to the picture) so go in the gallery +m in coments  Maybe a bit less intense green?  less saturation mybe  *maybe I can see how it can hurt your eyes on a dark backdrop ill try to do that right now still, I don't think it's bad gawd... these arent our branding colours crap sorry.  Argh, LO simply omits several polygons when rendering an svg :/ https://dl.dropbox.com/u/87946285/Shadow-intro.svg  WHile identical ones do show up sorry it took this long still somewhat limping  Definitely better could we do a round 2 of voting on Google+, then? comparing the different colors for it? I feel that, otherwise, we're shipping something else than people voted for... well, first: id love to have this in by monday afternoon alright, this is fine second: we cant ship with nonbranding colurs anyway +o true alright but let's make a post about the change of colors at least right. uhm... then: * we need a license statement from andrea (ill try to get that, as i am not on da anyway) * we need something fitting for the start center, the about screen and the windows installer can you contact andreas, then?  What is shown in the installer?  A header? https://dl.dropbox.com/u/87946285/nologoinstall.bmp – shown on first screen, at the left https://dl.dropbox.com/u/87946285/nologobanner.bmp – shown on all subsequent screens currently it uses tdf logos, which drew the ire of mozilla's asa dotzler http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2012/02/libreoffice_youre_do.html → thus, use libreoffice logos would it be possible to use a saner format? PNG, SVG, JPG? ill have to ask andras about that, but svg can be ruled out as it uses windows installer tech underneath png should be possible, dunno ok anyway, would you contact andreas about this? see if he's willing to make those? ill make a note what do you mean "willing to make those"? andras is a developer oh, not andras I meant the author of the splash ah, yup great move on? to templates? not quite... can we try to discuss the general direction for the start center? (i am squarely against something all-green...) we could have a green heading it's better to have a white background behind the buttons, though since they have a custom background on hover right, so would you say a rectangular green strip at the top containing the logo? I'd leave it up to Andrea just require to have a white background behind the buttons what if he doesn't answer so quickly? how quickly do we need it? id love to have something by monday, as i said = beta 3 tagging alright, then for now I'd vote for either staying with what we have or a green header I'm fine with whatever you choose okay.  the green header on top of the current start center? i dont believe mirek meant doubling down on branding yes okay... confused now but you just mean, we should use a similar white background and add a logo put in a green cage, rightß ? I meant a green gradient as a strip behind the "Libreoffice" logo on the start screen or a green box, if you'd like yes. then: about box... similar green strip on top, white on the bottom or two-phase green as in the splash? leave it up to Andrea, then I'd leave it up to you awk. okay, then templates, i guess.   How should I send you the svg ones? as I wrote, if we change the color on progress and ship only the second slide, then we can ship it u-one, email, whatever <alexanderW> Should I remove those white stripes in Sunset? <alexanderW> ONly half of them render (mirek, for context, björn says he won't get to do much on the templates, thus ill try to make them about shippable and then ask petr to include them, see what he says) what do you mean by "half of them render"? <alexanderW> http://ubuntuone.com/0Wt9XUnUX613y7UQGYBJwC <alexanderW> Not all of the poligons appear in LO <alexanderW> *polygons i see two photos, each of which has a white frame (at least i do in 3.5) <alexanderW> Those aren,'t the problem. There's something lika a corona do you have the svg, so i can compare? <alexanderW> http://ubuntuone.com/7LzmtwzBuooY9cc6XZDam3 thanks looks fine to me except the shadows are too harsh in libo <alexanderW> strange <alexanderW> So should we keep them? https://dl.dropbox.com/u/87946285/Screenshot%20from%202012-06-30%2018%3A56%3A43.png thats how it looks for me well, yes, i like the white frames somehow. mirek, what do you say? <alexanderW> No, I didn't mean the frames. There are some 'rays' coming from the bottom <alexanderW> I guess they shouldn't be _that_ transparent aftzer all ah. no i see what you mean the sun seems incomplete <alexanderW> yes hm, are they maybe cloned or something other fancy? now I see now I see it can you try removing them in your svg and try just copying those on the left and re-inserting them? <alexanderW> I originally cloned them, but then converted them to single objects <alexanderW> I'll try <alexanderW> now it works great :) <alexanderW> Perviously I didn't actually convert them to single objects <alexanderW> *Previously hm ... guess, rsvg in libreoffice is just odd. <alexanderW> indeed <alexanderW> but good enough in most cases not when it comes to our modern logo, sadly... <alexanderW> oh <alexanderW> Maybe LO could borrow some code from AOO two svg implementations = no good also: rsvg is much more mature than aoo's implementation <alexanderW> is it a seperate library? yes, gnome uses it too okay, are there more questions regarding templates..? <alexanderW> No, I can send them now great. what about progresx progress? <alexanderW> Well, we could create a template similar to it's style im sorry ill go afk now, but join again later on... ok <alexanderW> Ok, cu if we change the colors and ship only with the second master, then Caleb is ok with it we just need to replace the green <alexanderW> Hm, that's rather odd why? <alexanderW> It's only the color bothering him? no, it's bothering him that it's his design but since the template's first master is a copy of the original and not the second master and the colors are taken from the original as well by changing the colors, we distance ourselves enough from the original to be ok by caleb <alexanderW> ah, I thought he had also done a mock-up for the second slide <alexanderW> ok <alexanderW> Maybe something from the LO palette <alexanderW> not neccesarily green, though tbh, I think that one's pretty ugly the gnome palette is better, imho or we could use any other colors, really <alexanderW> alright libo branding shouldn't apply to the templates anything you'd suggest? <alexanderW> orange? perhaps we should look at the templates we have and see if any color is missing... hold on, I see will changed it already nevermind, sorry https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/File:Progress_preview.jpg we need to ship only the second slide, though which is what we planned, anyway anything else that needs to be done with the templates? <alexanderW> Should I play around with that design? <alexanderW> See what color looks good? I think gray is fine very neutral and simplistic <alexanderW> Alright <alexanderW> Template Picker? yes we need icons <alexanderW> Did you already work on that? should we turn to lapo for this or try to design them ourselves? not yet I guess we should make Tango icons <alexanderW> Yes. to fit with what we have now <alexanderW> Maybe we could collect some ideas though I would use the Gnome icon for selection <alexanderW> and ask whether lapo would be interested. If not, fine. I'll make a whiteboard for this, I guess <alexanderW> which one? <alexanderW> which gnome icon? the ones for the picker all of them or should I have one whiteboard per icon? <alexanderW> No btw, have you heard any updates on the remote control or the Android port? <alexanderW> No, and I havent found anything on the mailing list either ok, me neither also, would you like to attend the ESC call this week or should I? <alexanderW> I won't be at home this week. alright, I'll be there then :) <alexanderW> I can do the call next week, though <alexanderW> ok, thanks astron should be there then astron attends every other week after this week, though, I probably won't be able to make the calls for a while <alexanderW> ok, I can do them then I'll be taking a break, leaving the country great anything else we need to discuss? <alexanderW> I can't think of anything right now <alexanderW> Should we ask on the dev mailing list regarding thpose Gsoc projects? now that we have little to do, we could open up color handling it's an issue that will have to be addressed one time or another or we could go hunting for developers post something on G+, ask if any people would volunteer to develop something <alexanderW> 'something'? <alexanderW> Anything in specific? like a feature they would want themselves <alexanderW> I understand though we could suggest some ourselves if the developers have no preference like better style management or color handling which are, imho, priority cases <alexanderW> Style management would be great we also have a ton of old ideas on the wiki all archived, of course I'd also like an action overflow which would allow us to streamline the UI <alexanderW> But those are pretty big features, I think we should ask Astron first if it's feasible to ask people who might not have yet contributed to LO to develop something like this while allowing users of buttons that we would get rid of to bring them back with a simple drag-and-drop I asked Kendy about this it'd be great if we could turn these things into easy hacks we might need to cut them into parts for example, have one easy hack for the action overflow menu, another for the drag-and-drop functionality <alexanderW> Sounds good or style preview in the style dropdown first, then something more advanced in any case, it's good to snag a developer first <alexanderW> yes since nobody seems to want to work on design team's stuff right now everyone's busy with the tasks their company gives them <alexanderW> Understandable if they're wrapping up 3.6 I mean in general there's little UI work being done outside of GSoC it'd be helpful if there was a developer genuinely interested in making the UI better one that would actively engage with the design team <alexanderW> INdeed <alexanderW> Jan seems to be pretty engaged in that regard I've met with Kendy several times, and while he is engaged in that regard, he really only has time for the stuff that SuSE assigns him he's the one who actually told me we should snag a developer <alexanderW> Okay, sounds encouraging Google+ is a great place to get ourselves heard we already have over 600 followers <alexanderW> :) <alexanderW> I guess I'll post a tentative G+ post to the mailing list it might be better to brainstorm on it a little more though a rough draft G+ post would be ok a good kick-off for a brainstorm <alexanderW> Yes <alexanderW> Shall we wait for Stefan to return <alexanderW> ? sure, let's do that meanwhile, if you'd like to, you could write the G+ post or I could if you don't want to <alexanderW> Both and compare? how about you start it and then I add my own thoughts about it in a reply to kickstart a discussion <alexanderW> ok <alexanderW> Are you a developer and scratch a certain design-related itch? We're looking for some people who are motiveted to work together with the design team in order to work on certain aspects of our UI <alexanderW> :| <alexanderW> *and want to help scratch sounds like a job offer <alexanderW> lol <alexanderW> Yes, a bit make sure to say that it's volunteering post it to the mailing list, though, not here so that we can have a public discussion <alexanderW> Ok. How would you word it? A lot of people have been calling for a better UI for LibreOffice. For that to happen, we need interested developers. If you're a developer who's willing to volunteer his time in order to make LibreOffice work better, let us know in the comments below. It's your choice what to work on, and we'll design for pretty much anything. The changes have to be incremental, though, so no Ribbon. And if you're not a developer, plea I'll post it to the mailing list respond there or you can start a mailing list thread, if you'd like okay... im back <alexanderW> I'm just typing the mail <alexanderW> hi great! are you done already? (im mean doen chatting) -en+ne we've been thinking that it would be useful to get a developer to work with us on design stuff so we're thinking of putting up a Google+ post to find volunteers alex just posted his draft okay... if you could post the log again, like you did last time, would be very cool <alexanderW> Ideally we could work together with that new dev on easyhack-type chunks so, are you sure youll find that person through g+? im not saying you cant, but im somehow skeptical... <alexanderW> http://ubuntuone.com/3S1jeWxGFpmSQmrAzreg10 thanks"! alex, could you post a preliminary log? I don't have the beginning oh, alright, nevermind <alexanderW> Xchat cut it off again hold on, I might have the beginning hm... i should be able to fill in the beginning again, if you cant <alexanderW> alright <alexanderW> Maybe there are people who contributed in the past but don't do so currently whom we could motivate wait ... alex, you seem to have the complete chat + plus part of what happened last time :) <alexanderW> Last saturday's chat? okay, so maybe we should try to find ui-related easy hacks that wed like to advertise then? <alexanderW> Yes, something like that let's discuss this on the mailing list I'd like to have a public brainstorm astron, could you refine one of the suggested posts to your liking or offer your own suggestion? well there are already wiki pages https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Easy_Hacks_by_Topic should list some design related stuff. how about adding "Here are some things you might want to work on:" to the post, then first, we should make sure, that in each of the hacks we post, theres a comment by one of us regarding how to change behaviour I was thinking more about having a developer actively engaged with the design team not working on something already designed, but rather helping us shape a design and hopefully working on something he himself would really like to see in LibreOffice so the idea would come from the developer, not from a list of easy hacks though the developer could opt to work on an easy hack and we should suggest those to him okay... though, we should offer people some choices of stuff to assign themself yes, but these should be suggestions, not the only topics we allow okay, what ive done three times now is ask some friendly newcomer who'd already done two or three to fix some more similar ones. so you'd be against this G+ post? I think this is more about finding developers, getting them interested in LibO thats not what i meant to say really, just thinking out loud e.g i asked winfried to work on more split buttons and i asked muhammad to do some more stuff on the topice of the word count window out of curiosity, what things did you suggest? both of which turned out great results... well, winfried had done a split colour button for calc's background color thing, so i asked him if he could do the same for writer background/line/etc. colour buttons which led to this: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45671 sadly, winfried at some point found it hard to do any more of those ok btw, how did you (both) get involved with the design team? what got you interested? <alexanderW> I wanted to suggest a template contest <alexanderW> :) https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36112 :) thats how i got here and have you been involved in any other software project before? <alexanderW> I've done translations for Ubuntu packages and now elementary <alexanderW> How about you? I didn't like LibreOffice's UI, so I made a bunch of (at first not very well thought-out) suggestions I've done some translations as well so what about the Google+ post? <alexanderW> Do we have anything else do discuss? the ESC call astron, could you tell us about it? yes... in a minute okay, so... * michael has written the mail to the the gnome icon guys (on thursday, they dont seem to have answered yet) ok anything else? * kendy has backed out the changes that were responsible for the transparent menus * i said, wed have the splash stuff in beta3 * cedric lamented about how weve got 30 percent fewer active gsoc students than we should have (which might explain why were not hearing so much) do you know anything about the remote or Android app projects? <alexanderW> but it's being worked on the andoid port and the remote? so android port: i think iain billett is still doing good work but hes not publishing so much i believe remote app: ... dunno ... incidentally who was the student? <alexanderW> good question ah right, i believe that was andrzej. yes Andrzej Hunt so, i think andrzej was one of the gsoc students that went missing ok anything else from the call? * we discussed always enabling CJK/CTL support <alexanderW> whats that? (michael wanted to discuss that since i had written some stuff on the ux-advise list) cjk = chinese, japanese, korean; ctl = complex text layout, i.e. for indic scripts. displaying documents in these scripts always works, but working with them is really clumsy if you havent enabled support for it under tools/options/languages/enabled for [asian languages/complex text layout] <alexanderW> why would that be disabled by default? because it adds a bunch of ui, westerners would find unnecessary, the worst offence is that the paragraph style dialogue then contains three font selectors there are also three additional options pages activated by this, as well as menu entries for simple chinese to trad chinese conversion... <alexanderW> oh and how did you propose this be solved? enable only when downloading a version in one of these languages? the three font selectors thing is idiotic (since you could then also have font selectors for every single language) but apparently, this three fonts stuff has made it into the odf format https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice-ux-advise/2012-June/001248.html lists everything i said on the ml, i didnt have as much talk time in the call @mirek: there is the issue of people always using english ui, even though theyve got a different moth tongue, so discrimating by downloaded lang packs doesnt help so much sure, but they could surely enable this within options themselves no one goes into the options it makes sense to enable it by default for the languages that it's downloaded from :) that's a problem with the options also something we need to fix how will that go, btw? I remember that you put up an extensive analysis of the Options dialog <alexanderW> fixing the options? yes well at surface level pretty simple: remove a bunch of options + use better defaults. in that respect i absolutely admire calligra words (although i havent used it much) basically every other office suite is better at this than us actually i dont even have it installed here for lack of disk space yeah, but calligra words has no options dialogue... figure that that's weird I would at least think there'd be AutoCorrect options its a kde app ... craty right <alexanderW> Guys, I got to go eat something. Ill put up my part of the log thanks, alex! ok, cool <alexanderW> Bye bye ah have you ent the mail? +s alex? okay... guess thats no use, then anyway, there's no activity (afaik) on the options dialog right now it's a project we should start up again i agree. somehow we need a plan though. I'm looking for your in-depth analysis no, i mean generally... do we want to touch up the surface first or do we want to go in-depth first what do you mean? well the mso's ribbon effort was a "pretty up the surface" thing, while for instance the new print dialog in libo 3.4 is something where people went in-depth really? I see it as the opposite the options dialogue prettification is another in-depth op... it doesnt affect all that many people when we do that the ribbon was a deep rethinking of the whole Office GUI whereas the new print dialog wasn't thought out that well so, you're saying either keep everything and just rearrange it or really go through the options and choose what to keep and what to put into an extension/and advanced dialog ah, no ... what i try to say is: we can start on our take of a reimagined toolbars and menus first, or we can go through every dialogue and try to make more obscure places a bit nicer sorry, what toolbars and menus? in the options dialog? no. in the main window the "surface" of the ui i guess im too OT all the time... so, what about the options dialog? what would be in-depth and what would be on the surface? definitely more in-depth, as 50% of our users have probably never seen it okay, maybe 30% have never seen it I'm still not sure what you mean by those terms, though but just by definition, in-depth would be better by surface, i mean the stuff that everybody sees when they first start libreoffice, by depth i mean the stuff that people will use never/once a year/sometimes ok in-depth then okay... about the options: the first thing we probably need is an advanced options thingy I agree otherwise part of our established user base is going to go mad. i started some work on this at the hackfest but havent continued since but basically, the idea is to have about:mozilla, but for libreoffice about:config, you mean I agree yes, sorry would it be opened within a browser? thorsten had done something with python and calc in the past, but i thought, the best would be to open this in a base table however, base doesnt seem to be configurable enough, so it would probably be in a regular dialogue so HTML is out of the question? it does sound like a pretty bad idea to me outsource the options to browser (especially as we don't know which it will be) – what if ie 6 cant interpret our options etc.= ok, I was just thinking it might be simpler to develop that would be an adavantage, yes. although, as i said, thorsten did something similar with calc. if a person can't figure out how to at least install chrome frame, he probably won't be using advanced options where is your options analysis page, btw? https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Whiteboards/OptionsRework cool, thanks we also need to discuss whether to have one dialog for all options, or one for global options (with things like user info) and one for module-specific options I'd greatly prefer the latter so how would we do this? havent actually considered the second option so far... though, sounds surprisingly sane. could we turn https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Whiteboards/KillOptions into a general analysis of what to do with each option screen? no, thats what so far inexistent page "reorder options" is for I was thinking of having a deep analysis of all the options and then decide whether to keep them for rearrangement or not to keep them (btw, as you can see from my mock-up, i wanted to go for two hierarchy levels again ... which looks pretty insane now) ah, yes, thats what killoptions is for: list all options that should be removed without having to be replaced yes, I understand, but I'd like an analysis of ALL options, then categorize them into "kill" and "rearrange" hm.. do you want to work on that? if yes: cool! alright, I might I can't promise it for certain, though but I'll try if I do, though, could I rework the whole thing to work with our new whiteboard concept? it would be a much wider-reaching whiteboard, of course, with much deeper analysis of the current situation i am not sure our whiteboard stuff will work for this type of complex proposal that's what I thought as well, but all we need to do is establish the scope (which will be quite wide-ranging in this case, and done through a deep analysis of the current situation on another page) and then we need to design like always I'll try to do it somehow -- would that be alright? anyway, it would be good if we could get a coherent proposal for part one, the advanced options panel first. but, yes, you can try – maybe first on a user page well, the advanced options and normal options go hand in hand there's not much to design for in advanced options it's a simple two-column grid we just need to sift through what we need in the normal options haha, youre being naive there. :) but, really, there's not much actual design work there with advanced options have you thought about seen my bullets that discuss how to display the incredibly convoluted paths that our options use internally -"thought about" +? oh, ok, now I see alright, we could start there ftr, i think we cant even use // because i think thats in use somewhere too ok then, another pain point is navigation about:config is all about searching, while eg. gconf-editor is more browsing based I'd do it more about search thorsten favoured the searching based variant, and indeed, i do too. but we should try to sort stuff out into categories as well how would you display them? in a sidebar or so? not a complicated tree of categories, but just a heading to separate sections no, inline with the content wiki-style with a table of contents up top ah, interesting the toc idea is really nice, but id love to see a screenshot :) maybe later anyway, I think we can finish the chat now I'll make a list of all the options pages could you put up the log? part of it, yes. right, would you be open to have short chat tomorrow afternoon? (ill ask alex later on) would monday be ok? I won't have time tomorrow okay. what about, btw? about the splash screens status etc. so monday's too late, I guess? yeah, but nevermind, it shouldnt be so hard to do anyway and we can probably still change stuff till rc1 you can discuss it with Alex alone, I don't mind yes, we should be able to do that okay, thanks for the discussion then. bye. btw, what part of the chat? alex posted the beginning here on Ubuntu1 you should be able to have the whole log anyway, bye
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