Mr. D strikes again

Hey,

struggling to live up to the disruptiveness that seems to be expected
from me [1] I've once again pondered AbiWord's toolbar layout.
Remembering the pain caused by everyone smacking me over the head for
not taking into account what long term users expect from AbiWord this
time the changes are far more conservative.

The basic ideas are:
1) Have a "standard" toolbar that doesn't contain anything abiword
specific, has functions available through shortcuts and can therefore
be easily turned off by single toolbar fetishists.
2) Have a "formatting" toolbar that contains a maximum of a dozen most
frequently used actions.
3) Subtly encourage use of styles over font/size/b/i/u

Mockup: [2]

Short rationale, "format" toolbar from left to right:
+ "Styles" stays largely the same but list styles are no longer
contained in the styles dropdown.
+ A GtkMenuToolbutton (GMTB) that holds list styles. Clicking it turns
the current selection in a list according to the recently selected
style.
- Separator
+ Font GMTB (former combo). Most of the time the current font name is
not really important. (option, not sure: show uwog's fancy font
preview when current font around carent changes)
+ Font size, as always
- Separator
+ ... (selection most important buttons)

How is the climate for toolbar changes these days? Or is it just that
my proposals suck?

[1] ask Mark "uwog" for details
[2] http://www.abisource.com/~robsta/tmp/abiword-toolbars.png

Best,
D

PS: I'm aware that the "format" toolbar counts only 10 items at the
moment. The two remaining ones are reserved for "Start Collaboration"
and "Send [3] to uwog and MarOfTheManyNames"

[3] TBD
Received on Mon Sep 11 15:10:15 2006