[Digikam-users] Getting rid of button bars

[Jakob Oestergaard]

Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 08/04/07, Gerhard Kulzer <gerhard at kulzer.net> wrote:
>> The sidebars are considered essential to digiKam. Even if it was possible I
>> would not like to see them hidden. They can be reduced by simple click, and
>> F11 always catapults you into full screen mode.
>>
>> I don't find the UI 'horribly cluttered'.
>>
>> Gerhard
> 
> I may have exaggerated. I do find the right (maybe left on non-Hebrew
> systems:Albums, Dates, Tags, Searches) sidebar essential, but the left
> one (Properties, Metadata, Colours, Comments/Tags, Tag Filters) does
> not need to be in the main UI.

I guess that depends on how you work.

For me the Props/Meta/Color/... tabs are absolutely essential, and my 
wish for improvement would be the ability to cherry-pick information 
from several of the tabs and have it all shown in one; (for example 
linear and log histogram and shutter-speed and aperture).

As Gilles wrote, you can make them almost disappear and they will stay 
that way, not cluttering up the interface.

  Ideally (for us) horizontal screen
> space could be maximized by having the 9 sidebar buttons as a dropdown
> menu in the main toolbar, and a None option. That will net 40
> horizontal pixels width. As all our pictures have white bands above
> and below them in Digikam, it is obvious that the limiting factor in
> their display size is the horizontal width. So anything that we could
> do to increase the horizontal width would be helpful.

While you have a valid point wrt. the horizontal screen space, moving 
the tabs to a menu would make them more difficult (slower) to access 
(unless hotkeys were provided).

Also please consider portrait images, where we're short on vertical 
screen space. Most monitors are 4:3 or even wider; portrait images are 
much bigger victims of tool bars and menu bars than landscape images are 
of the side tabs.

I'm just trying to say that there's a lot more to this than saving 40 
pixels.

-- 
Best regards,
    Jakob Oestergaard