Hi, I posted my current Libreoffice setup to Google+ and people seemed to like it, so I decided to talk about it some here. I am finding the sidebar to be very usable, and so I thought it would be a good idea to see what implementing it would have on the rest of the interface. Right of the bat, the formatting toolbar becomes redundant as all of those buttons are already in the sidebar. So I removed the formatting toolbar. Then, because the sidebar includes the navigator, gallery, and styles and formatting toolboxes in them, I removed those buttons from the standard toolbar.
>From there, I decided it would be good to remove some of the bloat from the standard toolbar. Some of this is kind of subjective, but I stand by my choices anyway: *First off, cut/copy/paste is not needed in the standard toolbar, because those actions are almost always dependent on some location in the document--people usually use the right click to perform those actions in any application. *Zoom was removed since there is already an ability to zoom in the lower-right corner. *Save As, Page preview, and the spelling and grammar buttons were removed not necessarily because I think the functionality is not important, but because they don't merit their own icons. If anything, they should be merged with the save, print, and autospellcheck buttons. (that, or the autospellcheck icon should be moved to the status bar at the bottom.) *Hyperlink, table, show draw functions, and edit file were removed because I didn't see them being used very often, especially when table is an entire menu to itself. * I also moved the icons such that after open it goes save, exporting as pdf, print, email. This was done because saving and exporting, exporting and printing, and printing and emailing are each conceptually similar. In short, the order felt more natural. Anyway, without too much more explanation, here's a screenshot of what was achieved, in writer, impress, calc, and draw: http://imgur.com/a/XyN4O <http://imgur.com/a/XyN4O> (In my Google+ post, I used the flat icon set, but it wasn't working properly, so instead I used the default galaxy set) Here are some things I think were achieved: *'back' and 'forward' are closer to the left side where most people are used to them being in web browsers, file managers, and the like. *A more natural order of icons *more minimalism -- the long toolbar of icons is less daunting than it was before, doesn't have to hide icons when viewed on lower-resolution monitors, and there is a space for people to add their own toolbars without making another row. Thoughts? -- View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/A-more-usable-default-setup-tp4073632.html Sent from the Design mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/design/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
