| Summary: | Plasma User Interface Regressions - Add Widget | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | [Unmaintained] plasma4 | Reporter: | Brian Shannon <teapot.philosopher> |
| Component: | widget explorer | Assignee: | Plasma Bugs List <plasma-bugs-null> |
| Status: | RESOLVED INTENTIONAL | ||
| Severity: | normal | CC: | anaceciliamb, anselmolsm, aseigo, finex, g111, jjm, mjukis, rdieter, Stefan.Borggraefe, web |
| Priority: | NOR | ||
| Version First Reported In: | unspecified | ||
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Platform: | Compiled Sources | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Latest Commit: | Version Fixed In: | ||
| Sentry Crash Report: | |||
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Description
Brian Shannon
2009-10-01 06:35:56 UTC
*** Bug 210919 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** When writing the following forum posting I found this bug entry: http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=83817&start=0 So I repeat this here, too: I have compiled and tried the recent KDE4.4/trunk to play around with the new features. There I came across the new add-widget dialog of a panel. Besides some bugs that I have reported I think about the general usability of the new dialog. Where do you see the advantages of the new dialog? I see the following advantages of the old dialog (or disadvantages of the new dialog): 1) A vertical list IMHO is much more userfriendly. The user is used to scroll things vertically. If e.g. a webpage has to be scrolled horizontally this feels really bad. Maybe it is interesting and looking different, but it is not a good choice. 2) Also the new dialog is missing a scroll bar. Ok, you can scroll by using the mouse wheel, but scrolling without a scroll bar again is user unfriendly. A scroll bar is better to handle, a user is used to it, and you see the current position in the scrolled content. 3) A vertical list can much better contain long text strings. The new dialog is only looking good if widgets have short names. Also there is no space for a longer description of the widget. This IMHO does fit much better in the old style list dialog. 4) The new dialog has to be layoutet in two ways: Horizontally for horizontal panels and vertically for vertical panels. This is not only much more complicated for the designer and developer, but also this means there are two view styles for the user who have to "learn" them both. The old widget list was the same for both kind of panels. 5) The new dialog does not have a good place for the category tabs for a vertical panel. If there are presented one below the other you loose much space that otherwise could be used to display widget icons. Currently the text font is very small for this vertically stacked tabs. People with bad eyes will have a problem with this. So I cannot call this layout barrier-free. 6) The new add widget dialog has the problem that the categories are presented side by side in the horizontal layout and do not fit onto the screen. So you have to scroll this list to see all categories. This is very bad. In the old style you had the popup menu were all categories could be seen at a glance. Also it is IMHO not very intuitivly to see that you can scroll the category tabs. So where is the advantage of the new dialog style? If I could vote for one of the dialogs I clearly would vote for the old style. What is your opinion? The old style dialog: http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.2/screenshots/plasma-add-widget.png The new style dialog: http://bugsfiles.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=38340 Oh, by googling for a screenshot of the new dialog I found that I am not allone with my opinion: http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=82971 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209064 Oh, by googling for a screenshot of the new dialog I found that I am not allone with my opinion: http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=82971 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209064 What I most miss on new new interface is a scrollbar and some more space for a description of the plasmoid: the popup on hover is not enough, you've to hover the plasmoid icon for it. *** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. *** Related: Bug 212282 On KDE 4.4.5 the widget explorer doesn't hover the bottom panel so it is possible to add widgets into the panel. Anyway it is still not comfortable to find widgets in it. sorry, this report is a combination of vague issues, design discussion (lacking a lot of the relevant context) and with no "this can now be called done" end point discernible. perhaps you are looking for something more like brainstorm on forum.kde.org or would like to actually get involved in development. in either case, this is the wrong tool for the job. A discernible end point could be using the previous add widgets interface. Unless there is good cause not to, of course. |
