Saturday november 3rd starts the Calligra Week of Polish.

This means that the Calligra developers will concentrate their efforts on fixing those small things that irritate you even if they are not bugs per se. This thread is meant to collect such issues. So please write down the issues in replies to this post.

If you have an account at the KDE community wiki, you might want to enter them on this page instead: http://community.kde.org/Calligra/CWOP

We are looking forward to hear from you!

When Calligra Words is just launched, it provides an ability to create a new document or to open a recently edited one. What is really annoying is that when I click on one of the recently opened documents, Word does not generate any preview of the document. This is really frustrating.

The Interface of Calligra is giving user control. But currentlyt there is a whole bunch of unnecessary stuff in Editing Docker which I can not remove. It just eats screen estate without any benefit to me as a user. So, breaking groups of tools into smaller dockers will make control over Calligra interface way more fine-grained. And believe me, that is quite important.
Here is the picture which explains this problem: http://s15.postimage.org/kc8qx1tt7/unnecessary.png

Add Shape docker is, probably the most problematic from the point of view of usability. I think it should be completely redesigned. Because, currently it is really an ugly part of otherwise promising interface of Calligra Office Suite.

Moreover, the problem with adding multiple shapes is quite well solved in other part of Calligra - I mean in Kivio. Adding shapes from different collections onto stage is realy easy and straightforward. Why not do the same for the Add Shape docker?

The picture is self-explanatory :

Currently, the dockers behave as if they are not intended to be placed horisontally (on top or bottom of Calligra applications windows). So, curretly, say, in Stage the slides preview look like this:


If we move the Document docker to the bottom of the Stage window it becomes unusable:


To be usef-friendly it should work like this:


Horisontal placement of the menu is very important since more and more people are using widescreen monitor settings and vast majority of monitors have width bigger then height, so placing series of previews horisontally makes a lot of sense.

The tools docker can't be broken into seperate dockers. The reason is that you switch between different editing modes by the tabs, if you have several dockers it's not clear anymore in which mode you are.

The Add Shape docker is kind of a problem. It was redone several times, but never got perfect. The flow one is too complicated for the use outside Flow.

slangkamp wrote:The tools docker can't be broken into seperate dockers. The reason is that you switch between different editing modes by the tabs, if you have several dockers it's not clear anymore in which mode you are.

Well, as far as I remember around 2.0 version of Calligra they were separate dockers. And it is relatively recently that they were unified into a single Juggernaut.

I really value your work, but if Calligra team wants its product to be popular there gotta be a solution to this problem. Because the monstrous dockers - they are just killing the idea of the interface which is user-controllable and adjusted to users` needs. And it is so in the spirit of KDE - if I do not want menu - I just hide it, if I do not want something else I hide it.

Of course there are editing modes and other modes but these are more of technical things and they seem quite illogic:
[list=]
[*]For example why inserting tables is located in Text Editing docker?
[*]The same story with page layout - from the user perspective it is quite unexpected to see it in Text Editing
[*]Creating paths (???) is also in Text Editing - that is realy makes no sense. I think there is a reeeaslly little percentage of users who would create paths from inside word processing application. And I am telling this not because I never create these paths - I use mostly Inkscape or Karbon to work with vector graphics.
[/list]

With all said I do value and appreciate your work.

No, even in 2.0 it was one docker and an additional toolbox. Later the toolbox and the docker were merged, the other applications still use the old style. The old way had a number of problems, lots of users had trouble with the amout of flexibility.

It's not all in text editing, it's ends with references. These vertical tabs are a bit unusual as they are not often used and the Qt widget is not really clear.

Regarding the horizontal layout problem: That is a very good point and something that we actually started working on. The statistics docker can do this now even though it's not perfect yet. The slide preview (which is actually called the Document docker but slide preview is easier to understand) is a perfect example.

slangkamp wrote:No, even in 2.0 it was one docker and an additional toolbox. Later the toolbox and the docker were merged, the other applications still use the old style. The old way had a number of problems, lots of users had trouble with the amout of flexibility.

It's not all in text editing, it's ends with references. These vertical tabs are a bit unusual as they are not often used and the Qt widget is not really clear.

Well, if not all of that in text editing, then my system has a problem:


I think that this is more complicated than a choice with a lots of dockers
But since I am an interested userit seems it makes sense to make kinda survey among users.