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LibreOffice interview: Andreas Kainz talks about new icons and the Notebookbar

Andreas Kainz

LibreOffice’s design community works on improving the user interface of the software. Today we talk to Andreas Kainz, who has created new icon themes and made improvements to the Notebookbar, an experimental and alternative user interface layout that will become an option in future releases…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I live in Vienna, Austria. I have a KDE and LibreOffice-related blog, and a new one only for LibreOffice things, because I started by contributing to KDE, but in the last few years have been doing more and more with LibreOffice.

What have you been working on recently?

Here are some of the changes:

  • New default table styles for LibreOffice 6.0:

  • New area fill gradients for LibreOffice 6.1

And then, in terms of icons:

  • Colibre icon theme (for LibreOffice 6.1). Here’s what it looks like, with the Notebookbar activated:

All icon themes are available in PNG and SVG formats, under a GPL conforming licence, and I also maintain all three icon themes (Elementary, Colibre and Breeze – see below).

Regarding the Notebookbar, I have worked on the groupedbar full and compact, and the tabbedbar full and compact. I think that the Notebookbar is a great (optional) addition to the default toolbars and the sidebar.

(If you’re using LibreOffice 6.0 or 5.4, you can try the Notebookbar by following these steps. Please note that it’s still an experimental feature, though, and not ready for production use! But we’d like to hear your feedback.)

How much time do you spend contributing to LibreOffice?

I contribute in my spare time, between 23:00 – 01:00, when my daughter and wife are sleeping. Since 2014 I have submited 412 commits and 893,810 addition to LibreOffice core, which mean that I’m in second place in terms of additions (see the stats here – my username is DarkknightAK).

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

I’m the maintainer of the Breeze icons for KDE, and in 2014 the LibreOffice community asked if the Breeze icons could be available for LibreOffice. Four months later, 2,500 breeze icons had been drawn and Breeze become default in LibreOffice 5 for KDE, Unity, macOS and LibreOffice Online. Here’s what Breeze looks like:

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

LibreOffice is a friendly and structured project. With Gerrit and Jenkins it’s easy to have a good review process, when you’d like to submit a patch.

What does LibreOffice need most right now?

Contributors are always welcome. It would be awesome to have some goals where a team of developers AND designers work on them.

What tools do you use?

Inkscape and Kate.

Anything else you want to mention?

If you like my work, read my blog posts, join the LibreOffice design IRC channel (#libreoffice-design) or become a Patreon.

A big thanks to Andreas for his great work. As mentioned, LibreOffice users can try out the Notebookbar today, and give feedback to our design community, so that we can improve it further and make it available as a standard (optional) feature in the future!

LibreOffice community focus: Design

LibreOffice’s design community works on the software’s user interface (UI), improving its usability and accessibility. With LibreOffice 6.0 due to be released at the end of the month, we talked to members of the community to get their perspectives on the new version…

What have you been working on in preparation for LibreOffice 6.0?

Various things, including:

  • New table styles and new gradients (click for bigger):

  • The LibreOffice 6.0 motif/splash screen:

  • And menu and toolbar improvements

What are your favourite new features in this release?

Both GSoC (Google Summer of Code) projects are really nice: the revamped customization dialog, and the special character dialog with quick access from the toolbar. In addition, there’s the ability to rotate images to arbitrary degrees, and many other small improvements.

What tools and services do you use in the design community?

At the moment we use Balsamiq Mockups, but next we switch to Pencil. In addition, we use LibreOffice Draw (eg for the new motif) and Inkscape. For communication, we are active on IRC in the #libreoffice-design channel and Telegram.

Finally, how can people get involved with the design community?

A big thanks to the design team for their input and improvements in LibreOffice 6.0. For our final Community Focus, we’ll talk to the development community – more on that soon!

World Usability day – and making LibreOffice’s UX shine

Today is World Usability Day, beginning events around the world that “bring together communities of professional, industrial, educational, citizen, and government groups for our common objective: to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use.”

Starting today, and over the next few days, there will be 73 events across the globe, celebrating progress in user experience (UX) and educating everyone about how good design and usability affects our daily lives. Click here to find an event near you, and see this page to learn how to get involved.

UX at LibreOffice

Meanwhile, the LibreOffice design team is active in many areas relating to UX. One of the tasks is to respond to bug reports or enhancement requests on Bugzilla when UX input is requested with the keyword “needsUXEval”. This request might be just a simple “what do you folks think” or “how do we handle this in general”, through to a proposal for a complete redesign.

Started with a total number of more than 500 issues the team got the number down to 380 in the last year. And most tickets have been answered within one day!

Join the party

Most conversation is done on Bugzilla, where every opinion is valued. Some issues need a closer look and are discussed in the weekly meetings. Your contribution at both places would be highly appreciated!

Get involved with our UX communityand you can make a big difference for millions of end users around the world.

Video interview: Heiko Tietze, LibreOffice UX mentor

At FOSDEM this year, we made video interviews with members of the LibreOffice community and staff at The Document Foundation. We’ll be editing and uploading them regularly to the blog, so stay tuned! We start with Heiko Tietze, who is The Document Foundation’s UX (user experience) mentor and works with the design community:

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FOSDEM Call for Papers: Open Document Editors DevRoom

fosdemFOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each year in Brussels (Belgium) at the ULB Campus Solbosch. In 2017, it will be held on Saturday, February 4, and Sunday, February 5.

As usual, the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be jointly organized by Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice, on Saturday, February 4, in room 4.401 in Building K (from 10:30AM to 6:30PM). The shared devroom gives every project in this area a chance to present ODF related developments and innovations.

We are now inviting proposals for talks about Open Document Editors or the ODF document format, on topics such as code, extensions, localization, QA, UX, tools and adoption related cases. This is a unique opportunity to show new ideas and developments to a wide technical audience.

Length of talks should be limited to a maximum of 30 minutes, as we would like to have questions after each presentation, and to fit as many presenters as possible in the schedule. Exceptions must be explicitly requested and justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you request.

All submissions have to be made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM17.

While filing your proposal, please provide the title of your talk, a short abstract (one or two paragraphs), some information about yourself (name, bio and photo, but please do remember that your profile might be already stored at Pentabarf).

To submit your talk, click on “Create Event”, then make sure to select the “Open Document Editors” devroom as the “Track”. Otherwise, your talk will not be even considered for any devroom at all.

If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please contact ode-devroom-manager@fosdem.org.

The deadline is Monday, December 5th, 2016. Accepted speakers will be notified by Sunday, December 11th, 2016. The DevRoom schedule will be published on the same day.

Recording Permission

The talks in the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too.

In the “Submission notes” field, please indicate that you agree that your presentation will be licensed under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 or CC-BY-4.0 license and that you agree to have your presentation recorded. For example: “If my speech is accepted for FOSDEM, I hereby agree to license all recordings, slides, and other associated materials under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License. Sincerely, Name”.

LibreOffice Community Weeks: Wrapping up

LibreOffice Community Weeks

We’re already in to a new Month of LibreOffice, but in October we ran a series of Community Weeks, looking at what different teams in the LibreOffice project do, and how you can help them. So firstly, here’s a reminder of the articles, and then we’ll find out what effect they had…

Documentation

Development

Quality Assurance (QA)

Design

 

Feedback from the teams

So what effect did the Community Weeks have on the projects? Here’s what each team had to say:

Olivier Hallot (documentation): “The Community Weeks brought more people to the realm we are working in, and I had 3 new people showing up. One is a PhD professor from a university in India, who wrote a page on a set of Calc functions, and asked for more work. Another is a New Zealand national, involved in migrations and support, who is updating our books. I also got someone on IRC, but he did not came back. So overall, the week is positive, but we need people to return after their first contributions.”

Jan Iversen (development): “The week worked well – during the last period 15 people have got their first patch merged, and will appear by name in the 5.4 release notes. I often hear “but I cannot work full-time”, so it is important to realize that while roughly 50% of the changes are done by 20-30 people, the other 50% is done by hundreds of people making 1-10 patches a year. Every change counts and is very welcome! We arrange developers days, when a group wants help, so please contact us at mentor@documentfoundation.org if you need help.”

Xisco Fauli (QA): “There were 4-5 new users who showed up on IRC during the Bug Hunting Session, who may have joined from reading the Community Week posts. Also, we hope both posts from that week will help readers to report better bugs in the future (attaching simpler samples, adding clearer steps, and so forth).”

Heiko Tietze (design): “The campaign was interesting and encouraged readers to follow links to the Design Team Blog. Even if we didn’t get more active people showing up in the design project, comments are always welcome.”

Thanks to everyone who took part. We’ll do more Community Weeks next year, so if there’s something you want us to focus on, just let us know!

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