Start Page Redesign

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kkremitzki
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Re: Start Page Redesign

Post by kkremitzki »

triplus wrote:Looking good.

Some observations:

The file (information) preview panel is still empty by default? That is something that could change in the future. As if that is correct from user point of view there is this huge element sitting there and it is empty. It gives the impression something is missing or not working. And i was hoping you would style background and panels a bit. Not necessary going after the best possible job you can think of. But at least to start a discussion.
I agree with you on this, but I'm not really sure what would be good to fill the far-right description pane with when nothing is highlighted.
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yorik
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Re: Start Page Redesign

Post by yorik »

Another idea I had: The recent files could be not a list, but a grid of thumbnails. Of course there is the problem that only fcstd files will have a thumbnail. But even so, that might be more user-friendly... There could also be more than four recent items, but that depends on FreeCAD itself, not sure how many are stored internally, I'll check on that.
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NormandC
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Re: Start Page Redesign

Post by NormandC »

yorik wrote:Of course there is the problem that only fcstd files will have a thumbnail.
It's not the real problem. On the most used platform (Windows), thumbnails still cannot be activated easily.

https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... =50#p65742
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kkremitzki
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Re: Start Page Redesign

Post by kkremitzki »

Definitely Yorik, that's on my plan to implement. As far as thumbnails, I think a nice and simple placeholder icon (like a grayscale FreeCAD logo) plus a filesize would be nice. For the default contents of the sidebar, I think a spruced up version of the text shown now when hovering over Getting Started would work well. Having a picture like the other items in "start a new project" would be good too.

I was thinking of adding a minified Bootstrap file as a dependency to make handling CSS less of a pain and make things just look nicer in general. It'd be about 20kb and it's MIT licensed. Thoughts?

Example theme options: https://bootswatch.com/
I'm a big fan of https://bootswatch.com/sandstone/
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yorik
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Re: Start Page Redesign

Post by yorik »

kkremitzki wrote: It'd be about 20kb and it's MIT licensed. Thoughts?
I think there's no problem (MIT, BSD and LGPL licenses are fine to bundle with FreeCAD).
triplus
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Re: Start Page Redesign

Post by triplus »

kkremitzki wrote:I agree with you on this, but I'm not really sure what would be good to fill the far-right description pane with when nothing is highlighted.
When doing such work i usually end up thinking more about the possible solutions compared to programming it. And as such layout doesn’t work for me i would change it. On how would i do that.

Likely 14 days (or more) of thinking, work and a lot of prototyping in between. After that i would likely know what i don't want or can't be done in a straightforward fashion. And with a bit of luck i would have something. Likely in raw form. But it would allow me to work on it further.
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kkremitzki
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Re: Start Page Redesign

Post by kkremitzki »

So I'm considering shelving this for now. With the discussion going on here about Qt5 WebKit deprecation, I'm hesitant to put more time into something that ultimately may be better off rewritten to be native to the application rather than a pseudo-webpage.

Unless someone thinks what I have so far (not much more than what's in the last screenshot) is worth upstreaming, or only a few details away from being good enough, I'm going to put this little project on hold.
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sgrogan
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Re: Start Page Redesign

Post by sgrogan »

kkremitzki wrote:Unless someone thinks what I have so far (not much more than what's in the last screenshot) is worth upstreaming, or only a few details away from being good enough, I'm going to put this little project on hold.
My 2 cents would be to merge what you have. I agree with Yorik that it is already an improvement.
Even after FreeCAD is fully ported to QT5 it will be some time before we support it on Win and Ubuntu, and I imagine FreeCAD will still support QT4 for quite some time even after that.
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triplus
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Re: Start Page Redesign

Post by triplus »

kkremitzki wrote:So I'm considering shelving this for now. With the discussion going on here about Qt5 WebKit deprecation, I'm hesitant to put more time into something that ultimately may be better off rewritten to be native to the application rather than a pseudo-webpage.

Unless someone thinks what I have so far (not much more than what's in the last screenshot) is worth upstreaming, or only a few details away from being good enough, I'm going to put this little project on hold.
You invested effort in it and i have read the comments again. Nobody had any real objections therefore in my opinion you should upstream the effort.

P.S. It's a bit tricky i know. As it looks like a little project. But once you start working on it it quickly becomes a big project. In my opinion at least 2 months of work and dedication needed to see some real progress for a project of such scope.
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NormandC
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Re: Start Page Redesign

Post by NormandC »

sgrogan wrote:My 2 cents would be to merge what you have. I agree with Yorik that it is already an improvement.
+1
sgrogan wrote:Even after FreeCAD is fully ported to QT5 it will be some time before we support it on Win and Ubuntu, and I imagine FreeCAD will still support QT4 for quite some time even after that.
Yes. blacey said that Qt5 needs to be >=5.6, but even in Ubuntu 16.04, the version is 5.5 which is known to have issues. In 14.04 Qt5 is even older (5.2). Ubuntu 16.04 will be maintained until 2021. I hope Qt 5.6+ gets backported at some point... :?

Maybe the solution will be AppImage or Snap packages.
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