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Sometimes, older is better...

When I first started Quelea, I wanted to use it as a kind of testing ground for features and ideas that hadn't already been incorporated into church presentation software. Both in terms of the UI, features and functionality. A lot of these features have worked really well - the ability to import from survivor songbooks for instance, and the instant search that's further improved in the next release.

On the UI side of things I tried to have a go with the ribbon - it's still got a love/hate relationship with people, but I wondered if it could do any good in Quelea. So I had a go, implemented it and left it as such for a few releases.

Thing is, it just didn't work - and I think this was a 50:50 split between it not being suitable for Quelea and the flamingo implementation.

On the suitable for Quelea side:
  • For something that's often run on laptops with small screens, it took up a huge amount of space it didn't need to.
  • There weren't enough controls to make it viable. It works (ish) for office because it replaced a hugely complex menu system, but Quelea just doesn't have that complex menu system, and it won't for the foreseeable future. So it really just acted like a huge toolbar.
And on the flamingo side:
  • It was pretty unmaintained, which doesn't exactly add to my confidence.
  • It only integrated well with the substance look and feel, which users might not want to use.
  • It only integrated at all well with Windows, and Quelea is targetted at cross platform use.
  • It looked - well, odd. Most bits are there, but odd bits like the tight integration with the Window aren't, and that just makes it feel like something's not quite there with it. Combine this with the first point and it isn't going away any time soon either.
Perhaps there are some things I could've chosen to make it look better - like designing the UI in SWT rather than Swing (which has a much nicer looking ribbon.) But I've now replaced the ribbon with a standard set of toolbars and menus, and personally I think this looks much nicer. We'll see how it pans out in practice, but sometimes the older, traditional way is definitely the better one!

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