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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    kpresenter GUI cleanup (2)
From:       Thomas Zander <zander () planescape ! com>
Date:       2002-05-18 12:38:55
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Lots of good work has been done, thanx Percy!
Here is another set of suggestions on fixing usability problems in kpresenter

The properties dialog uses the buttons 'ok','reset','apply','close'
Looking at the rest of KDE the only place where a reset is used is in kcontrol
where it has a special purpose (being in a framework etc)
After pressing reset a couple of times when I was aiming for ok I am pretty
sure a better solution would be to use the 'ok','apply','cancel' default 
dialog if at all passible.
The reset functionality would then be replaced by the cancel button.

The tab 'Pen' is referenced in other software (mostly drawing software) as
Outline or Stroke.  Could someone with PowerPoint take a look at their naming?
I don't think 'Pen' covers the meaning of the idea.

On the same tab 'Pen' the combo boxes for arrows (line begin/end) don't do
anything when the line is closed (text/box/circle etc).  
I would suggest putting the two combo boxes in a groupbox:
  +-Line ends: --------+
  | begin:  V | Normal |
  | end:    V | Normal |
  +--------------------+
and disabling the whole groupbox when these are not appropriate.

Tab 'Pen'
Section 'Width';  the spinbox could probably do with the units of the line-width.
Is it pixels, points?

Tab 'Brush' 
s/Fill with/Fill Type/
s/No brush/No Background Fill/   (as used in KWord)
When the users selects 'No brush' disable the preview so the background
color shows through. (As done in KWord in the frame properties dialog)

The tab 'General' should always be the first tab in the dialog.

The tabs 'Geometry' and 'General' both use the '&g' as their shortcut

The tab 'Geometry' has a groupbox at the bottom; please put a spacer beneath
that so the groupbox only takes the space it should take, makes it clearer etc.

Tab 'Rectangle'
s/Settings/Rounding/
s/Roundedness X/Vertical declination/
s/Roundedness Y/Horizontal declination/
The spinboxes could use a ' %' suffix
Why don't the spinboxes allow 100?
A spacer would be nice beneath the settings box (now renamed to Rounding) so
it only takes the space needed.

Tab 'Pie'
The 'Settings' groupbox is not needed. It can be deleted.
the spinboxes could use the degrees (°  0xb0) char.

Tab 'Poligon'
The 'Settings' groupbox is not needed. It can be deleted.


---

At selecting a closed object the line-begin/line-end toolbar items 
should be disabled.

The 'Brush color' toolbar icon should be disabled when no object is selected.
The 'Color' toolbar icon (just left of the Brush color) should be named 'Text
Color'. (a clearer 'disabled' icon would also be nice)

In the presentation toolbar is a 'pen color' button; I can't find what it does,
but I don't think it belongs on a toolbar!  It should be put in the 'configure
pages' dialog if its some sort of wat to draw on your sheets while they are 
playing.  That way you can also provide a little text on how to use it.

The edit->delete should as for confirmation with a dialog (probably with a 
don't ask again checkbox)

Menu screen presentations
 - the name of the menu should probably be 'Screen Presentation' (no s)
 - configure pages should probably be 'Configure presentation'
 - pen Width should probaby be 'Pen Size'
 - Open presentation Structure editor' should be 'Structure editor...'

---

The 'assign effects' dialog
Please use 2 tabs for this dialog, one called '&Show' and one called '&Remove'
The 'order of appearence'
    +- Appear --------------+
    |   1 st.   [make last] |
    +-----------------------+
A groupbox called 'Appear', with a spinbox which has a minimum of 1 and a 
suffix ' st.'. The groupbox also has a button 'make last' which calculates the
highest value currently used and puts that, plus one, in the spinbox.

s/Effect (appearing)/Appear/
s/Effect (object specific)/Effect/
The 'Timer of the object' should _not_ be disabled when the presentation is 
set to manually advance.  They are in a different level of configurability 
and should not interfere with each other.

Why is it impossible to put a sound effect on objects, is it only possible
on one object per sheet?  Then the sound effect is per slide; and I would 
suggest adding another tab to this dialog called 'slide sound effects' with 
a 'start' and an 'end' checkbox.


---
The duplicate object dialog (edit->duplicate object) has labels and text boxes
one below each other.
It would look a lot better if the text boxes were right of the labels.
The text boxes could probably all be converted to spinboxes and have better
boundraries checking. Things like moving the object in milimeters is nice
but if the user has no idea how big his canvas is a maximum value is nice to 
have.  The maximum does not have to be a hard maximum. Just do it like
the number of copies at the top, where the maximum is done in a slider but
you can still type in the spinbox:

    Rotation:   [0.0 °]    0 [|     ] 360

In this dialog a reset buttons seems quite stupid, please remove it.


Ok, thats enough for this time!  Hope you like it :)

-- 
Thomas Zander                                           zander@planescape.com
                                                 We are what we pretend to be

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