Improved character selector

[Torsten Rahn]

Nice to see that KCharselect is receiving some love :)

However looking at the screenshot I feel a bit puzzled:

What kind of use case does this GUI try to address?

I'd say that 90% of the users go into the Charselector to search for a glyph 
that is not accessible via the keyboard and have it copied into the clipboard 
(or similar) via pressing a button. 

So having a "search" line edit at the top doesn't really make sense unless you 
plan to look-up details via a keystroke which will likely be the minority of 
users. I also think that the details tab on the right covers way too many 
details presented by default.

I'd suggest to 

- Add a copy button to let the user copy the character into the clipboard
- have the information panel not displayed by default but instead once you 
press a button "Details".
- Contact the usability people to review this dialog.

Torsten

On Monday 26 March 2007 14:42:14 Daniel Laidig wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm working on adding Unicode information to KCharSelect [1]. Now, most
> things work and since I'm new to KDE development, I would like to have this
> reviewed here first.
>
> New features include improved GUI, full character names and descriptions,
> categorization, search and drag and drop.
>
> You can see a screenshot of the new widget here: [2] and I've attached the
> sources.
>
> - kcharselect.cpp
> - kcharselect.h
> - kcharselect_p.h
> - kcharselectdata.cpp and kcharselectdata_p.h
>   Contains functions to access the data. Only used by KCharSelect
> internally. - kcharselect_unicodedata.h
>   Internal header, included by kcharselectdata.cpp, generated by a script.
>   Note that I've removed large parts of the data since the file is quite
> huge.
>
> You can get a full patch for kdelibs and kdeutils at [3] if you want to
> test the code.
>
> At the moment, this blows up the size of kdeui quite much. The first plan
> was to make just the data a plugin, loaded on access. When the mail server
> was down tronical suggested on IRC to move KCharSelect completely to
> kdeutils (as a plugin) and to just have the interface in kdelibs/interfaces
> (like kregexpeditor).
>
> I think that's a good idea and I will work on it the next few days. If I'm
> ready, I'll post the interface here.
>
> The code has still some flaws and the search code should be rewritten
> completely. I'll deal with this in the next weeks. Also not everything
> follows the coding style yet.
>
> I first wanted to commit today, but the downtime made it impossible to
> discuss this here.
>
> If there are no objections, I would like to commit next Monday, April 2
> (and port everything in trunk of course). That would remove
> kdelibs/widgets/kcharselect* and add a file to kdelibs/interfaces. I don't
> know if this commit is affected by the freeze of April 1, but there was no
> other way.
>
> Thanks!
> Daniel
>
> [1] http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-usability&m=117269912217918&w=2
> [2] http://daniel-laidig.de/kde/kcharselect/kcharselect-screenshot1.png
> [3] http://daniel-laidig.de/kde/kcharselect/kdelibs.patch.bz2
>     http://daniel-laidig.de/kde/kcharselect/kdeutils.patch



-- 
 Torsten Rahn
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