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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Observations on the new KWord startup dialog
From:       Charles de Miramon <cmiramon () kde-france ! org>
Date:       2003-05-24 22:23:24
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Hi,
I've looked the very promising screenshots of Thomas' work :
http://linpacker.tuxfamily.org/newconcept1.jpg 
http://linpacker.tuxfamily.org/newconcept2.jpg 
http://linpacker.tuxfamily.org/newconcept3.jpg 

very nice.

Some observations and a proposition for an alternative widget :

For the second pane : 
- It looks to me that embedding the Kfiledialog is a bit too much. 
- It would be very nice to be able to toggle between the preview and the 
informations about the file (something generally much more useful for a 
wordprocessor than a preview, even if it has less eye-candy ;-))
A search button to be able to launch an embed  KFind would be great

For the third pane, the last opened filed should be shown in a list view with 
the full path ( so you can tell the difference between the document on your 
hard disk and the bacup on a floppy) and the date.

More generally, the OK - Quit buttons are not very clear. It is not a normal 
Quit button (meaning quit this dialog), here it is exiting KWord, so it 
should be labeled differently something like 'Quit KWord' with the same icon 
than Quit in the file menu.

At the bottom of the dialog there should be a dynamic line explaining the 
action for the first pane like 
'Create a new document with template XYZ' <OK>  <Quit KWord>

Something I find very counter-intuitive in the KFiledialog is that clicking on 
the location arrow, you get the last opened documents. I really don't see the 
logic of it. It is very confusing.

An other proposition :

I'm not a developper but I had a different idea for the the startup dialog 
IMHO more elegant, which is extending KFileDialog so you can put icons on the 
left column not only linked to locations but to actions. For example, you 
would get a left column in the startup dialog like that
<New document>
<New from template>
<Last documents>
<Search documents>
<Desktop>
<My documents>
<Home>
<Floppy>

Clicking on the first icon, would just open KWord with an empty document in 
the standard template (for people who want to quickly take notes without 
thinking about choosing now a template)
Clicking on the second icon would launch your first pane
Clicking on the third icon would launch your third pane

I think the elegance of my solution is that it is extensible and that the user 
can customize it. For example, when we will have search folders in KDE (I 
hope in the near future). The user could add a new icon in the column e.g. 
<letters from last week> presenting a list of all the kword files with the 
letter template in the /home directory and subdirectory sorted by date. 
Something that would be great for a secretary.

Maybe my solution is technically much more complicate to code than yours, but 
it would be a much nicer and powerful UI, I believe. 

Cheers,
Charles

PS: cross-posting to kde-usability
-- 
cmiramon@kde-france.org
http://www.kde-france.org

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