Hi Jürgen, On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 01:13:23PM +0200, Jürgen Schmidt wrote: > > But more important is the question how we can move forward with the > already planned improvements of this feature (see the wiki pages).
I guess in the usual way: someone sits down, and writes code ;) > Especially the tabs on the right site with icons etc. comparable to the > side bar in Symphony. Symphony comes here with some good improvements > and useful property side bars. Now that you mentioned it: although the property side bar is "something new" and may be useful from a user perspective, it has several drawbacks, and introduces several regressions compared to what AOO actually has to offer: - from the user perspective, AOO currently supports a way to customize User Interface elements, at application and document level (Tools - Customize dialog). Symphony's property side bars are completely hard-coded in resource files, no way to customize them - from the programmability perspective: AOO currently offers extension developer a whole set of features, from disabling commands via configuration, dispatch interception, menu and toolbar merging, etc. Symphony's property sidebars cannot be extended by the merging mechanism (as said before, their structure is hard-coded). The most important part is that the property sidebar wasn't design taking programmability into account: try disabling some command as explain in http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/WritingUNO/Disable_Commands it will work with toolbars and menus (in context menus the command is not disabled, but at least the command is not dispatched); but in the property sidebar the command is enabled and even dispatched While some of these regressions can be fixed (among other things, not dispatching through the SfxDispatcher but through the SfxBindings, ...), allowing customization of the sidebars seems not doable (at least in the current state of the application framework). In conclusion, I wouldn't speak about a "revolutionary UI change" in the code that has been contributed; as explained above, it has several drawbacks and, from some perspective, is a regression from what AOO currently offers to users and extension developers. > And we have already a mechanism to > integrate such task panes/side bars via extensions. We should think > about how we can bring together both ... I recall that Carsten Driesner told me that the way how the tool panel was implemented was a sort of hack; the real solution was in the refactoring he was doing in the layout manager code, to support docking windows as new UI elements; unfortunately, he no longer works on OpenOffice, and there isn't much in the cws dockingwindows2 to get an idea. This shows another drawback of the Symphony sidebar implementation, as completely designed in the old sfx2 framework, away from all the UNO stuff that makes the application programable for extension development. I guess that with a corporate mind, making this stuff extensible wasn't in the original plan; while here at Apache OpenOffice, extensibility is a way to produce a software for the public good, that can be extended without the need to modify (nor learn) a single line of code (and nor building the code by yourself from source, simply using our binaries, provided to you for your "convenience"). Regards -- Ariel Constenla-Haile La Plata, Argentina
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