Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Toolbar improvements

On Friday, I was able to spend a bit of time on UI hacking which I love. Those small and tiny pieces that when combined, do a big difference - do you remember my GSoC task proposal in this area? ;-) Unfortunately, no student has picked that; but let's see if somebody else gets interested.

This time it was the toolbar's menus. So far those menus were too prominently visible on the toolbar, while not that much used. Additionally, you can get the same functionality as a context menu - when you right-click on the toolbar. Together with our UX guys, we agreed that the best will be to remove them, and show the ">>" marks only when there are hidden toolbar items. You can see the changes on a "Before/After" screenshot:

And how does it look like when there are hidden items:

This will be available in LibreOffice 3.5. There is a small follow-up Easy Hack, see EasyHack: Make the toolbar menu easier. I'll be happy to provide you with details if you want to try this one - just drop me a mail.