UI design?

Are you guys looking for a UI designer? I would love to contribute in any way I can.

I’ve been using Joplin for a few weeks and am very happy with it so far. I run a UX design studio in Pune, India (www.kritiidesign.com), and have been looking for opportunities to contribute to open source projects in my spare time. Made a post in the Joplin subreddit about it, but looks like there isn’t much of a conversation happening there.

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that would be great if get to some kind of cooperation.
In particular, as this summer will be our first GSoC season, so we should align things early :slight_smile:

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Sure. What’s the best way to take this forward? I would like to understand what the team is looking for in terms of a UX/UI intervention, what the constraints are, toolset, etc.

@PackElend @laurent How can I get started? Sorry, I'm not very up-to-date on the conversations here, or the general way of working.

Looks like there have been a few conversations on the forum with mockups users have done. Is that the way to go, or something more formal?

@abogawat, it’s probably a lot of work to come up with a new UI for Joplin, but if you have some idea feel free to give it a try.

One issue I’ve noticed with previous UI proposals if that they introduce new features, for example tabs, or note snippets, etc. which means we can’t even implement the design because the features aren’t there (and in some cases won’t be).

So to keep it simple and make sure we can use the design, it’s best to stick to the features that Joplin currently offers. On the other hand changing the layout, appearance of components, etc. of course is perfectly fine.

@laurent one ui change i can think off, of the top of my head is to change this

to this

image

I think what he means is the complete redesign of the App. Change the whole UX. Make Joplin look modern and slick.

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@laurent I’m definitely in favor of working within the constraints of the current feature set. Not just from a development perspective - making very broad changes is not going to be a good idea for folks who have been using the app for a while. We will need to have transition plans in place for major changes.

I’ll start consolidating my notes on what can be done and how we can prioritize things. @PackElend suggested joining the GSoC team so we can weave this in with that effort as possible. I’m not very familiar with the project, so will dig into the forum posts on that over the weekend.

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Hi @abogawat,

I checked your designs at http://kritiidesign.com and all of them are damn Good!
I am too an UI designer(still learning), I created a design for Joplin and I would love to hear your views on my design. Can you please check it out here and give advice on it?
https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/improved-ui-for-joplin

Hi Sir @laurent ,
If you are mentioning this UI design https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/improved-ui-for-joplin in your comment.
Then I will create the features as well if I got selected for Gsoc.

Any feature you add in the design may or may not be something we want. It needs to be discussed and people aren't necessarily interested in discussing it, so as a result your design will get stuck because of something unrelated, even though other parts of it might be good.

If you keep it simple, and stick to the current features, then we only need to discuss the design, which is much simpler and less time consuming.

Hi! Thank you for bringing this issue up! Joplin is fantastic, but it’s looks is well… outdated. Would really love to see new modern and slick UI for Joplin, i.e. something more like MacOS notes, but with proper folders (I mean showing notes in the tree, like if those were files on the filesystem) to free extra horizontal space.

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Thank you @Enmk for your review!
Although I don't own a Mac and am the type to use XMonad in Arch, I certainly can appreciate your view that a Mac like UI design would look slicker. However, as you probably already know that Joplin is a cross platform app, working across Mac, Windows and Linux. So it may be difficult to completely emulate a Mac design and make it work cross platform.
However, improvements and suggestions for the same are always welcome and hoping to receive more critical comments and ideas from you :smiley:

@abogawat Any progress on this issue?

Hope you saw this, but just in case you didn't:

:slight_smile:

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Your suggestion is precisely the same as the recommendation I made several years ago- to show notes in the tree in order to more efficiently use screen space. The current display interface used by Joplin and Evernote occupies a considerable amount of screen space and forces the use's eye to scan the first column of notebooks, then shift gaze over to the next column of notes. This seems quite inefficient when the notebooks and notes could be easily incorporated into a single tree. Many of the leading note-taking apps use this approach: Rightnote, UltraRecall, MyInfo, Mybase.

I am a big fan of Joplin, but have switched to Trilium because the Joplin non-tree interface was unsuitable for my workflow. If Joplin were to implement a proper tree design, I'm fairly confident that I'll switch back to Joplin because of its very rapid development.