Thanks to Adam and Ariya the topic is hot now so I couldn't resist commenting it :)
From what I can see, they're trying to:
1) get rid of menus
2) get rid of modal dialogs.
I completely support those two goals. Heh, I should have shown those of you who were in Malaga "kdevelop4geeks.ui" file that has been lying on my desktop for more than a month ;) That file is the concept of KDevelop4 user interface I created before I heard about MS Office 12. First version of it didn't contain menus at all and second included a "Menu" button just where the "File" menu is in MSO12. Other concepts I was playing with were different though. Anyway, most of them were efforts to move most of functionality from dialogs to views inside the main window which coincide with the second effort of MS guys.
Thus said, I have to admit that we should probably not copy their interface, at least not in KDevelop. I've only looked at screenshots so I can be wrong here, but it seems their interface is designed for mouse users. Contrary to that, I'd like to see KDevelop interface completely navigatable by keyboard. More, I'd like to make keyboard navigation the prefferred way over mousing. Therefore it's more likely we have to invent a different UI.
Anyway, I'll try to gather my UI ideas and blog more about them soon.
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1 comment:
Firstly, I suggest to activate "word verification" in your blog so you don't get so much SPAM in comments ;-).
Thanks, no spam anymore :)
So in fact, it seems to me that it would be easier to navigate through options this way, because you only have those "ribbons", instead of menus+views.
Ok, but what's about only views and a simple command toolbar at the top. Using the command toolbar you'd be able to execute actions in KDevelop, using views you would be able to see the results of those actions.
MSO doesn't need to show much output from actions. We in KDevelop do.
For example, I'd like to activate "Build" command. And I could do that using command bar. But then I'd like to see the compiler output. I need a view for that probably.
You could say that I could probably perform the "Build" action from a view. This is also correct but this leaves a problem of too many views unsolved. If an action is executed through some command bar, a view could be created/activated on the fly. More, this could enable us to load the "makeoutput" plugin on the fly.
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