Subject: RE: lists stuff
From: Thomas Fletcher (thomasf@qnx.com)
Date: Fri Dec 01 2000 - 13:12:07 CST
On Fri, 1 Dec 2000, Joaquin Cuenca Abela wrote:
> Thomas wrote:
> > On Thu, 30 Nov 2000, Joaquin Cuenca Abela wrote:
> > > Ok, I don't know how it can be done, but I trust you (after
> > > all, nobody here knows the modeless framework and the list's
> > > dialog like you :)
> > >
> > > So, again, anybody thinks (yet :) that our list's dialog UI is
> > > better than the word one (besides the modeless stuff)?
> > > Anybody will be again a change of the list's dialog to mimic
> > > the word one?
> >
> > What is important about our dialog, is that as you mentioned,
> > it will have all the functionality of the Word customized
> > dialog. If at some future point in time we want to put a
> > simple preview dialog like Word's between the document
> > and this dialog ... we can. Right now it is more important
> > to have the customize functionality so we skip the pretty
> > little multiple preview windows.
>
> And why don't do it right the first time? (ok, actually, the second time)
> Do we really need to do it wrong (with all the features, but with a suckiest
> UI), just to redo it a few weeks latter?
Note: I'm going to refer to Word list dialog 1 to
mean the first Word list dialog you get and Word
list dialog 2 to mean the second Word list dialog
you get after going through Word list dialog 1 (for
customization).
It isn't a matter of re-doing a few weeks later, it is a
matter of having a prgression/growth of a feature. We
needed a dialog that tested all of the features of the
list implementation to see when and where things broke.
The back-end implementation of lists had to come first,
then something to test that implementation was quickly
whipped together by Martin ... our first list dialog.
At the same time that Martin et all were ironing out
back-end problems, we decided that we could build a nicer
dialog that would still give us access to almost all
the features of lists for testing, but wouldn't be
horribly ugly. We looked at the Word dialog 1 & 2 and
liked the feature set, but due to time limitations
decided to work on something closer to the Word dialog
2 that would suit our testing needs. Since it is just
a dialog, when you have time you can go ahead and
implement a Word dialog 1 style dialog for AbiWord
which can then call the current list dialog which has
all of the features. We can't test a full list implementation
with something like the Word Dialog 1 ... not to mention
the fact that I think the extra dialog is just overhead,
and is extra code that would need to be written/co-ordinated
on all of our platforms.
One working list dialog which is both functional and
featurefull is a noble endeavour as far as I'm concerned.
I'll be very happy once we are done with the design and
back end of this dialog.
Thomas
-------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas (toe-mah) Fletcher QNX Software Systems
thomasf@qnx.com Neutrino Development Group
(613)-591-0931 http://www.qnx.com/~thomasf
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