Decks are containers of panels, one or more of them. The content in the sidebar is organized into decks and panels. It provides access to frequently used tasks when editing documents. The sidebar is a window at the right side of the edit view of Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw. Another one is that extensions can now add new decks and panels that can freely mix with existing decks and panels. One important new feature is that the sidebar is easily configurable via the, well, configuration. The sidebar looks similar to the Symphony property panel but shares no code with it. The core implementation of the sidebar and the framework provided for panel developers is completely new. Only small changes were necessary to plug them into the sidebar. The third group consists of non-modal dialogs like the Navigator, the Gallery, or the Styles and Formatting dialog.If you don't know what a view shell is, good for you. They are not view shells anymore they are now regular controls. The new framework of the sidebar made big cleanups of their implementations possible. They allow you for example to control animations of slides and shapes. The Impress panels come from OpenOffice.The one new property panel for inserting shapes into draw documents has roughly one tenth the number of code lines of the text property panel and still has about the same number of controls. Removing duplicated code could reduce their code size and their complexity considerably. While the property panels work really well, their implementation could profit from more cleanup. In the process we have cleaned up the code, made some improvements and fixed many bugs. The property panels that let you for example change the size of text or the color of shapes have all been migrated from Symphony.The sidebar panels come from three different sources and have been improved in the migration process: Symphony renamed this to "property panel", extended it to all applications and covered even more frequently used tasks. In it was named "task pane" and was used primarily in Impress to give access to backgrounds, layouts, and shape and slide animations. The concept, but not the name, of a sidebar has existed for many years both in Apache OpenOffice (and before that) and in IBM Lotus Symphony. The core implementation is new but the content, the panels, did already exist.
For the sidebar the situation is a little different. Usually the phrase "new and improved" does not make much sense because something either is new or did already exist and was improved upon.
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