Okular active

[Marco Martin]

On Friday 18 May 2012, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> Hi Marco,
> 
> On Thursday 17 May 2012 17:47:15 Marco Martin wrote:
> > packaging is fixed, unfortunately at the moment it still have to be
> > launched from the shell with active-documentviewer pdfpath
> 
> Just tried it out. Although it might be a bit early for feedback at this
> stage, here's my first impression anyways:
> - The search function with highlighting within the grid is awesome!
> Although being able to step through results may still be necessary at some
> point, this is great for an overview of which page might most likely be
> the one you were looking for. Great feature! :)

unfortunately seems a bit slow, we'll see if usable enough ;)

> (There is a bug when navigating to page from the search results, though,
> I'll file it on BKO).
> - Rendering the pages for the first time seems to take longer than in
> desktop Okular. I already thought Okular Active was pretty slow overall,
> but then I realized that it is actually quite smooth after the pages are
> fully rendered. However I'm sure this will still get optimized anyway :)

seems some unnecessary painting is still happening, especially when zoomed in 
(may require yet another level of pixmap caching)

> - Unless the document is wider than the screen, it should not pan
> horizontally, as this is very irritating while scrolling (you usually don't
> move your finger _exactly_ vertically while scrolling)

but in that case the problem would be that is not possible to switch page by 
horizontal swipe..

> - The swiping distance required to trigger a page flip should be reduced (I
> noticed this recently in Images as well). Finding a good value there is
> very difficult. I found that e.g. in tabletReader the distance was too
> short, which frequently caused accidental page flips. However currently in
> Okular Active and Images, you have to swipe really long to flip a page /
> change switch to another picture, which feels a bit cumbersome
> 
> Generally a very good start. I think that especially with your and Bogdan's
> efforts combined, we will have a really good PDF viewer in the end. Now if
> only we could get Xrandr working...
> 
> On a general note: I like how the right drawer works in both the Resource
> Browser and Okular Active. I will write an HIG about it soon and suggest it
> to be used anywhere it makes sense. It allows for very nice interaction
> flows as well as consistency across applications.

that's the idea that was behind it:
apps should have a correct 3d-ish appearance, the blueish background be the 
"deeepest" background, while the paper-like one (and the various theme 
elements) should live "over" it.

for applications that need a "control" area (either a sidebar or an almost 
entire screen as okular) one side of the screen should be draggable to uncover 
this control area, here we have 2 use cases:

a) if the control area is ephemerous, chose an action and it closes again: 
case of okular and the side panels of the shell itself (recommendations, 
activities) it should look as a panel pulled over the app content, that never 
gets resized, and automatically closes

b) if this area is something more long lived, something that will stay open 
until the user closes it because it can be useful after being used for the 
first ime, this is the case of the file browser.
it looks like pulling the app content away and uncovering the control area, so 
has an higher z order (and the blueish background) and the app content area 
gets resized.

that is the general idea, still has to be refined and put in a rigurous 
understandable form of course ;)


Cheers,
Marco Martin