dia gui

[Jeroen Zwartepoorte <Jeroen xs4all nl>]

Hello,

I'm a big fan of Gnome and lately also dia. I've used Visio before and
i've seen Kivio in action. I have some comments & ideas for dia's GUI.

The GUI seems to be a gimp look-a-like. This differs strongly from the
approach that Visio & Kivio have taken.

In comparison, dia lacks a couple of things:
- No toolbar with buttons for frequently used functionality (cut, copy,
paste, load, save, print etc.)
- No toolbar with font editing buttons (alignment, size, type,
bold/italic/underlined etc.)
- No easy navigation if your diagram has more than 1 sheet (you need
multiple files/windows)

And then some issues with dia itself:
- The main window is very dense: everything is packed together to occupy
as little room as possible. The items all lack a label: you only know
what an object is by looking at it's tooltip (if you don't recognise the
icon).

Would it not be better/easier to use if dia would change it's style to
something like Kivio/Visio? (see Kivio screenshot to get an idea:
http://www.thekompany.com/products/kivio/pics/stencils_dock_full.png).

The only "new" thing i can see right now is a custom component for the
shapes container (you could use a standard Gnome IconList, but that
doesn't give you the page support that is visible in the screenshot. The
shortcutbar (the component with the Inbox etc. in Evolution) has that,
but it only supports 1 column.

Also, i think that using such a GUI, it would bring dia more in line
with other Gnome Office apps like Gnumeric and AbiWord.

A list of possible items in a new GUI for dia:
- Shapes list (possibly using GnomeDock so it can be separated from the
main window)
- Tabs for multiple sheets (like gnumeric does)
- Toolbars for frequently used functions
- Statusbar
- Fullscreen option (like in Galeon) that would only show the sheet.

A side question: why different builds for GTK+ & Gnome?

I'm relatively new to Gnome programming so i may not be the best
frontman for this job, but i'm willing to help.

Jeroen Zwartepoorte