[horde] Interface design Horde 4.1/5.0

[Ralf Lang]

Am 16.01.2012 05:26, schrieb Michael M Slusarz:
> Quoting Maciej Uhlig <maciej.uhlig at us.edu.pl>:
>
>> The most serious issue with all these is three _different_ user
>> interfaces while we should have only one. The most straightforward and
>> quick fix (according to Kaizen continuous improvement philosophy) is to
>> give all aplications the old interface (i.e. old good sidebar) with
>> dynamic capabilities. This shouldn't be very difficult as far as dynamic
>> Imp is concerned. I don't know about Kronolith, but it's 10% only.
>
> You are right: it's not difficult.  It is IMPOSSIBLE.  The old sidebar 
> (i.e. in traditional mode) is completely different structurally from 
> the new sidebar (i.e. in dimp).
>
> From a historical perspective: people have to realize that the dimp 
> sidebar was NEVER intended to work for anything else other than dimp.  
> It's good that we are talking about this now, but it's not like we 
> purposely decided to make three different UI interfaces.  When dimp 
> was being developed (2006-07ish), it was the only dynamic application 
> under development and, more important, I was only being paid to 
> develop a solution that worked in dimp.
>
> I wish we had an army of 10 engineers working on the backend code, and 
> 5 in-house UI/graphics people.  But we don't.   Much like any 
> open-source project, features come first - later, the interface 
> becomes polished.  Which is not a bad thing - interface polishing 
> occurs after feedback on feature-usage, which is more useful 
> information than vice versa.
>
> michael
>
> ___________________________________
> Michael Slusarz [slusarz at horde.org]
>
Hi Michael, I don't think this is about offending you. H3-ish dimp had 
some hacks and tricks to make it work as though it was a portal and we 
used that. Some of this has been removed in H4 because it had some 
quirks which never really worked out anyway (like the "portal" of dimp 
for traditional apps in inline mode, some configuration hacks for dimp 
sidebar) and when we're now looking forward to the new interface, this 
doesn't mean you did anything wrong five years ago.  In fact, dimp and 
later the new kronolith ui were "selling" horde to some I showed it.

A consistent dynamic interface approach (and library) may encourage lazy 
people like me to step in and port some legacy stuff / missing features 
to dynamic view - or somebody else to pay for it ;-)

I am not a UI specialist. I make UIs from patterns I've seen elsewhere 
and from building blocks provided by the environment. I understand users 
are waiting for a new consistent interface and I understand there was no 
time for that in 4.0 because the whole 4.0 project seems to have taken 
much longer than originally anticipated in (2005?).

-- 
Ralf Lang
Linux Consultant / Developer
Tel.: +49-170-6381563
Mail: lang at b1-systems.de

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