[Qgis-developer] Composer redesign

[Marco Bernasocchi]

I'll send plenty of angry little green men to anybody consitering 
removing a vertical scroll bar :)

ciao
On 02/02/2012 04:18 PM, Andreas Neumann wrote:
> Hi Nathan,
>
> In general I like your redesign.
>
> Regarding the vertical scrollbars: they aren't removed, are they? When
> redesigning the print composer, please think about small netbook and
> smartphone screens where the vertical scrollbars and tabs are the only
> means of reaching all UI elements. Those are the reasons why they were
> introduced in the first place.
>
> One thing I don't like currently is the drawing of the basic shapes
> (rects, circles, triangles). In normal drawing applications one selects
> the shape first and then draws it. In Print Composer you always draw a
> circle first (even if you usually want a rect) and later change the
> shape to what you want. This is not very streamlined. I would prefer to
> have a drop-down button that allows to select the shape first (like the
> align and order buttons) and then start drawing.
>
> I did not test your branch though.
>
> Andreas
>
> On Thu, 2 Feb 2012 23:06:21 +1000, Nathan Woodrow wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Tonight I did some tweaking to the composer window.  A few things had
>> been bugging me a for a while now and I decided I would have a go at
>> fixing some of them, or at least try to anyway.
>>
>> The general changes are:
>>
>> * Redesign the composition (general) tab to remove the need
>> to vertical scroll, in most cases. (Not a perfect redesign but it
>> works IMO much better then the old layout)
>> * Remove wasted space around paper area and widget (see picture[1]
>> vs your install to see the difference)
>> * Convert the split widget + tab widget to QDockWidgets. 1) The
>> splitter didn't remember its last position or state 2) Could only view
>> one tab at a time 3) The main QGIS window uses dock widgets to allow
>> flexibility in screen layout, composer should too. 4) Can't hide tabs
>> if you don't need to see them all the time e.g. command history .
>> Using dock widgets solves all of these issues.
>>
>> The current working branch can be found
>> at https://github.com/NathanW2/Quantum-GIS/tree/composer-redesign [1]
>>
>>
>> I have also attached [1] an annotated screen shot if you don't want
>> to compile the branch.
>>
>> If I could get some general feeback and testing that would be good,
>> keep in mind it's not a final copy and I will tweak things as I go.
>>
>> I'm currently adding it so the dock windows remember the state, just
>> like the main QGIS dock widgets, but that isn't in the branch yet.
>>
>> [1] http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/525/composer1026.png/ [2]
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Nathan
>>
>> Links:
>> ------
>> [1] https://github.com/NathanW2/Quantum-GIS/tree/composer-redesign
>> [2] http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/525/composer1026.png/
>


-- 
Marco Bernasocchi
www.opengis.ch