“Perfection is reached not when there’s nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing left to remove.” - Antoine de St. Exupery
I have been frustrated with the UI of Flo now for the past week. As mindmaps grow larger, I keep feeling the UI get crowded. Now maybe there is nothing that can be done to fix this. I don't know, but I wonder what you in the audience think. I feel my input is now rendered useless because after 2 years I am so trained on how it works I don't notice the UI braindamages.
So can anyone provide me with mockups of a cleaner interface? What would you remove from the toolbar and hide in a menu? What would you do with that "Property" editor on the lower right hand corner? Is it better served as a floating dialog? Is the title editor better served as an in-line editor on the mind map? Or should it be on a dashboard of the main UI. Should the top toolbar be smaller?
Also for any of you who are interested I have subversion opened at: http://svn.geiseri.com/svn/projects/flo. You will need at least Qt 4.3, perl and HunSpell's development libraries installed. On windows I have included HunSpell.
Syndicate Blogs
What exactly is flo?
I googled but cannot figure out exactly what is flo. Where is the project's homepage? I see that you use Hspell, is this an Israeli project?
Hspell as for hunspell, an
Hspell as for hunspell, an improved replacement for myspell.
hspell != hunspell
Uh, no, hspell and hunspell are 2 completely different projects. It looks like hunspell is what is actually meant here, so the blog text should be fixed to say so!
By the way, while hunspell is a good choice, it would be much better to just use Sonnet which can use hunspell or just about any other spellchecker out there. It's sad to see projects reinventing the wheel over and over again just to avoid depending on kdelibs, something which isn't even useful anymore now that KDE 4 is cross-platform.
my mistake
i corrected the post.
as for reinventing the wheel yes its sad, but KDE is way too heavy for just a spell checker. KDE is not as cross platform as advertised, imho. now if the trolls put a spellchecking lib into Qt that would be optimum.
It's a mind mapping program
Right now I lack a home page, the closest I have right now is the subversion and an outdated wiki page on my projects wiki. See http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3727 for more of an introduction.
Some mockups
Hi Ian,
I felt inspired by your work, so I created some mockups, that came to my mind, when I saw Flo. (Sorry I didn't pay enough attention while exporting them, so they contain a rather large amount of nothingness around them.) The nothingness inside them is intentional
Some ideas have also already been mentioned by others.
I'd use the start screen, the empty canvas to display some useful information like rudimentary usage instructions or a tip of the day or a list of recent documents.
Ideas can be added by doubleclicking the canvas and can be edited by doubleclicking the idea itself. In edit mode the node is zoomed in to reveal all its properties.
They are aligned by snapping to an invisible grid, that is infered from the position of other nodes. I think kivio already has something like this.
Just some quick ideas, but perhaps some can be useful.
michael
nice!
can you tell me how you did the blue shapes? you have me thinking, i will have to update my codefu a bit for the eyecandy though.
Blue shapes
Hi Ian,
I used OmniGraffle on the Mac to do this. My thinkpad's display and therefore my whole OSS machine is broken right now. I'll tell you how I would have done it with open source tools in inkscape.
First you create a rectangle and alter its corner radius (Rx and Ry) to get the rounded corners. Then you set the rectangle's fill & stroke. I used a grey stroke, which I'm not sure is the best choice, but for a wireframe is definitely alright. For the rectangle's fill you choose a bilinear gradient; that's gradient and in the "Repeat" combobox the value "reflected". Then you "Edit..." the gradient, which allows you to change its colors. I like to work with hue, saturation and lightness (HSL), for the blue shapes I used a nice blue that I liked as one stop (gradient end point) and altered the lightness for the other stop. Once you have the colors right, you use the "create and edit gradient"-tool (ctrl-F1) to manipulate the gradient on canvas. To do this you drag the endpoints in the position you like. If you hold down the ctrl key while dragging the nodes snap to an invisble grid, which allows you to work with the necessary precision. Drag the darker color's handle into the middle and the other handle 90 degrees upward or downward. Adjust the length to you liking.
That's it. I hope that was what you were asking for. Just ask some more, if you were indeed looking for drawing instructions, this protocol was sure a bit on the short side.
michael
I haven't had a chance to try
I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but here are my ideas anyway. These are things I thought about for a mind map program some months ago.
1. Ideas should be in-line editable, in fact anything displayed should be.
2. Mousewheel should zoom in and out. The zoom should be centered on the mouse's cursor. I think marble does this. Holding down ctrl isn't necessary.
3. Certain zoom levels should remove detail. ie. zoom out enough, and the ideas with no children get hidden. All the way to a full zoom out showing only root ideas.
4. The align buttons should be put into a menu, or optional toolbar.
5. Toolbars should be use-based. One for editing content, one for navigating, one for finished format work, one for printing/whatever. It seems like you've got that set up already, but I'd only show the editing and navigating by default.
I'm going to try your program out when I've got time this week.
>> 2. Mousewheel should zoom
>> 2. Mousewheel should zoom in and out. The zoom should be centered on the mouse's cursor. I think marble does this. Holding down ctrl isn't necessary.
Mousewheel on its own scrolls the view, and does so in just about every app. Hijacking this default behaviour is not so good. Better to require a modifier (and Ctrl+Mousewheel is zoom in Firefox and Dolphin, so it has some precedent.