2025-09-05, 14:30–15:00 (Europe/Budapest), Track Room
Me and Heiko talk about various changes in the UI and Theming, the identified problems, the solutions being worked upon, potential solutions and general direction.
The Appearance tab was redesigned after the GSoC project, themes were first bundled then simplified. Document colors were first changed as per the application theme, but then a toggle was added to force use the white document colors. There were themes, which represented groups of various UI elements and appearance which specified light/dark/system color modes. These were merged into one entity "LibreOffice Theme" for sanity.
Then there was a second project which focused on improving the overall appearance on windows by implementing native widgets. This ended in disaster however as windows doesn't have any modern widget toolkit, win32 just couldn't do it and WinUI3 has been abandoned by Microsoft. A lot of small issues were identified and which when grouped together make LibreOffice look "old/not-modern" on windows, and a number of action items were created, which are currently being worked upon.
the welcome dialog was a welcome addition to the batch by Heiko, which increases the visibility of various UI options which the user otherwise wouldn't have discovered intuitively.
Started contributing to LibreOffice during the college summer vacations --- got involved with the design team --- worked on the LibreOffice Themes GSoC project under Heiko's mentorship --- interned at allotropia, now CollaboraProductivity.
UX architect @TDF