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AbiWord Big Toolbar Solutions

There are many problems with the toolbar in AbiWord when it comes to the OLPC:

1. it's too big to fit on the screen
2. it's very complicated compared to the other Sugar apps
3. it has a lot of buttons that just don't seem relevant on the OLPC
4. many of the visual metaphors seem unlikely to make sense to the OLPC target audience (heck, some of them are unlikely to make sense to anyone).

It's too big

Here's what Abi looks like maximized on a 640x480 screen:

Many buttons are hidden and there's no way to access them. These include buttons like text color and insert picture, which seem like they might be appealing features for kids. I can think of four ways we might solve this problem:

use fewer buttons (low difficulty) This seems like an appealing option: it's easy, it would allow us to tailor the functionality for kids, and it conforms well with Red Hat's mockups. And here's a mockup of how Abi would look like with this approach.

have no toolbar (low difficulty) This doesn't work very well at all with Red Hat's desire to get rid of menus.

Contextual toolbars (medium difficulty) This would mean having a toolbar that changed based on context. For example, it might show formatting tools only after you select some text. This might make it hard to discover features and might be confusing, but it would allow us to have much more functionality than we could with just a single toolbar.

Floating contextual toolbars (high difficulty) These would be toolbars that float over the document canvas and are different according to context. So, if you select some text you'd get text formatting buttons hovering near the selection, but if you select an image you might get image tools.

Of all of these, "use fewer buttons" seems like a good place to start, so I did an inventory of AbiWord features and their seeming relevance on the OLPC to see what seems most appropriate for the OLPC Users.

It's complicated

This would be solved by any of the solutions suggested for the size problem.

The buttons aren't all relevant

This would be addressed by paring down the buttons according to the AbiWord OLPC Feature Inventory mentioned above. Check out the list of AbiWord Features To Leave Off the OLPC

The visual metaphors don't make sense

In order to solve this I'm working on an AbiWord Toolbar Metaphor Analysis.