<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /></head><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"><div class="gmail_quote">On December 24, 2015 1:49:42 PM GMT+01:00, Arnav Dhamija <arnav.dhamija@gmail.com> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Hi everyone<br />
<br />
I am a first year computer science undergraduate at the university
and I have a project idea I want to implement in the Dolphin file
manager. Response from the Dolphin team has been positive and they
have suggested bringing the issue towards the usability side to
create an easy to use GUI to make this happen. My idea is as
follows:<br />
</font><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><br />
<b>Trays Panel Extension for the Dolphin File Manager for
improving GUI file selection operations</b><b><br />
</b><br />
Selecting multiple files in any file manager for copying and
pasting has never been a pleasant experience, especially if the
files are in a non-continuous order. Often, when copying files
between devices we might find that we need to select only a
subset of the required files we have selected and this leads to
the unwieldy operation of removing files from our selection. Of
course, the common workaround is to create a new folder and to
put all the items in but this is a very inefficient process and
can be very slow if large files need to be copied between
devices.<br />
<br />
My solution to this problem is to add a panel/view in Dolphin
where the links to files and folders can be temporarily saved
for a session. The files and folders are "staged" on this panel.
Hence, the user can add folders and files from several different
directories to this panel and can then collectively perform
actions on all the items in the tray such as copy, paste, cut,
upload images in selection to Facebook, upload files to Dropbox,
etc. This makes complex file operations easy by staging the
operation before performing it. <br />
<br />
Files can be added to this tray by using a right-click context
menu option or by using the mouse scroll click or drag and drop.
As an additional option, the session for the File Tray Panel can
be saved for later use.<br />
<br />
</font></font><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><font face="Helvetica,
Arial, sans-serif">My initial idea was to have another <b>split
view </b>mode with its button in the toolbar in Dolphin. It
will function similarly to the existing split view but with
one half of the screen dedicated to the "Files tray". This
would make it neatly integrated with Dolphin's existing
toolset and it would make dragging and dropping easy. Dolphin
maintainer Emmanuel Pescosta suggested using Plasmoids to make
the project more cohesive with KDE and to make it usable with
multiple applications (eg Gwenview).<br />
<br />
I would be much obliged to hear feedback from the usability
and visual design team on this and suggestions for a cleaner
UI. Thanks!<br />
<br />
</font></font></font>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br />
<font face="arial">arnav dhamija</font></div>
<p style="margin-top: 2.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; border-bottom: 1px solid #000"></p><pre class="k9mail"><hr /><br />Visual-design mailing list<br />Visual-design@kde.org<br /><a href="https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/visual-design">https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/visual-design</a><br /></pre></blockquote></div><br clear="all">Hi Arnav,<br>
This sounds like a very interesting idea!<br>
I won't go too much into interaction design details right now as I think those would better be explored over the course of GSoC.<br>
As for the dolphin panel vs. Plasmoid decision: Actually I'd like to see both: A plasmoid would, as Emmanuel said, have clear benefits beyond Dolphin.<br>
Within Dolphin itself, however, an integrated panel in the main GUI would be better. Therefore I it would be great to have both, the content of which would be synchronized.<br>
The developers have to tell you whether doing both would be beyond the scope of GSoC or not. If you can do only one of them at first, is say you can decide which one to start with.<br>
In general is say thumbs up for exploring this idea!<br>
Best,<br>
Thomas</body></html>