Tag: Google Summer of Code

Few days ago the new collections dialog for GNOME Documents landed in master. Since the last post the dialog received some improvements:

An empty view

When there are no collections, instead of displaying an empty list we show a special view to add your first collection.

A more polished dialog

The border of the list was removed giving more view to the list’s content. Suggested buttons are indicated, so that the theme can colour them differently to give a hint to the user. Spaces between elements have been changed according to the GNOME HIG and now they are in increments of 6 pixels.

Animations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-C8ohMZTsE

When deleting a collection, the row now slides on the left to make room for the delete message with the undo button. If the undo button is clicked the collection row slides back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlR1weMETHo

When the undo button is showed a timer starts. If it is not clicked in time the collection is deleted and the row disappears.

My work on GNOME Documents as a Google Summer of Code student is over, but I have strong interest in continuing to contribute in this awesome community. I would like to thank again my mentor, Debarshi, for his guidance and help when things didn’t work; the GNOME design team for gave me a good mockup to work on; Lapo for the graphical tips he suggested me after the previous blog post and Emmanuele for his advice on GTK.

This summer, as a Google Summer of Code Project,  I’m working on implement a new collections pattern for Documents. Let’s discuss the changes made so far!

The current dialog has some problems because it hasn’t a clear way to add a new collection and it lacks on some features like renaming and deleting a displayed collection. Although the missing features aren’t reachable from the collections dialog, it is already possible to rename from the property dialog and delete from the selection mode.

The new collections dialog at this time looks like this:

The collections are displayed more clearly and a new one can be added more easily. With the new design we also gained the ability to prevent duplicate collections names since we can disable the “Add” button if a collection with that name already exists.

If a collection has just been deleted, it can be restored with the “Undo” button.

And when renaming a collection the other rows are disabled.

This is what I’ve done until today. It took me a lot of time to reach the current state and I would like to thank my mentor Debarshi for being helpful and available at all times, and for answering all my questions just a second after I ask them.

The work-in-progress patch can be found here. Feedback is welcome, if you have any please let me know!