It’s not clear yet if or when this area can be addressed but it’s something that we’re already discussing with Collabora and is high up on our wishlist. As explained before: this is a good approach to make existing features available straightforward, but it also comes with some UI/UX problems, especially on touch only devices. For example the sidebars, which currently still rely on the rendering of VCL dialogs onto a browser canvas. The foundation of the work explained (jsdialog) also is the basis to get more dialogs converted to HTML/CSS/JS and to improve other areas as well. The buttons are all big enough to be used with a finger and some widgets on iOS even call native dialogs (UIKit) for example for printing or choosing a font. The following picture is from the 6.4 release and shows, how the “notebookbar” looks on an iPad. On smartphones (iPhone and Android) the new interface is called “mobilewizard” and it is already active since the 4.2 release back in February. With 6.4 this new tablet interface (called “notebookbar”) became the default for Chromebooks and iPads and it can also be enabled in Collabora Online using the user_interface.mode config setting. And these new interfaces can now be used in Collabora Online and all the apps that build upon it (iOS, iPadOS, Chromebooks, Android). The widgets can now be styled with CSS and the rendering is done by the browser engine which renders highly optimized widgets that work perfectly well in a touch only environment.īased on this approach, Szymon, Jan Holesovsky, Pedro Pinto Silva, and many other Collaborans implemented two new touch optimized interfaces: one for tablets and one for phone screens. New Touch Optimized Interfacesīased on the jsdialog solution it is now possible to create HTML/CSS/JS based user interfaces and get JSON encoded information from the core about the buttons, lists, labels, etc. This approach is called “jsdialog” and you can find the commits in the core repository of LibreOffice. Szymon Kłos (Collabora) and Caolán McNamara (Red Hat) came up with a solution that allows the models that create the VCL dialogs to send JSON encoded widget information to clients who do not want to draw VCL (or GTK/QT) widgets.
LIBREOFFICE FOR ANDROID CODE
Smartphones have a small screen and are usually only used with one or two fingers.Īs a completely new UI implementation for touch devices would increase the maintenance cost significantly the Collabora engineers started to look for a different approach that makes it possible to reuse as much code as possible of the VCL based UI stack we have in LibreOffice.
LIBREOFFICE FOR ANDROID FOR ANDROID
While the interface on Chromebooks has roughly the same requirements as on iPads, the story looks different for Android phones. Meanwhile, Collabora also started to work on an Android and later also on a version for Chromebooks and it became clear, that the VCL based dialogs won’t be a good fit for those platforms.
This is how the main menu looked like in December 2018: This implementation was targeted to users who work with a mouse and a keyboard, but it was not yet fully optimized for a touch only environment, like the iPad.
In the initial releases the user interface was more or less borrowed from what Collabora Online offered.
2018) we first had to create a solid foundation to get the large LibreOffice code base reliably working on iOS. When Collabora and Adfinis started the journey of bringing LibreOffice to iOS (Oct. The NotebookBar – a Simpler and Better User Interface This blog posts highlights some technical details and explains why this release is so crucial.
LIBREOFFICE FOR ANDROID UPGRADE
Note: if you want to learn about the history of this project you should also check the first and the second blog post in this series!Īfter roughly two years of hard work driven by Collabora the latest upgrade of their LibreOffice based on iOS and Android app shines with many UI and UX improvements, better performance, important bug fixes and new features. Version 6.4 is a major upgrade of the LibreOffice based office suite on your Apple and Android mobile device!
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