We want to focus all UI related issues in one project. Development, discussions, proposals - everything should be at the same place. It is currently typical that the developers of the UI are spread in different projects. Most of them are not only dealing with UI, but also with other responsibilities.
This UI project will be the home for all the UI related stuff.
On the technical side, the current situation has the drawback, that large libraries are getting loaded at startup time. The code of course doesn't get loaded, but the loading time of libraries has a relation to the amount of functions that are exposed by this library. While moving the UI code itself to the UI project over the time, one important goal will be a solution for this problem, probably by moving the code to some smaller libraries and loading them on demand.
I think that we should not simply move the code from one place to another. There is some code that is old and maybe more code that is very old; and other code that is very very old :-). The developers listening here will understand that some of the code has already reached a kind of "end of life" in the sense of maintainability. If one wants to know what I mean, he might want to dig in code like from the Stylist, the Ruler or the Tools/Configure dialog.
Another important feature, which we might want to implement is at a first step a replaceable UI. This could mean that one is able to replace i.e. dialogs, accelerators, pop up menus and such. Replaceable means that one can easier integrate one of the applications into his own environment/application as a component. In the longer term a second step might be a customizable UI. Customizable means that one would be able to customize the UI to his own needs for himself, his deployment of OpenOffice.org or his integration of OpenOffice.org, by i.e. reduce the functionality of certain dialogs without the need of providing an own one.
Your contribution is welcome.
Regards,