Behavior change in KPageDialog/KPageWidgetItem

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Monday 01 October 2007 11:27:52 Anders Lund wrote:
> On Monday 01 October 2007, Adam Treat wrote:
> > Heh.  I've got your point.  A default widget to present will be fine.  In
> > fact, as sebas pointed out, treeview's are no longer recommended by our
> > HIG.   I'm going to see in the future about eliminating the treeview from
> > Kate altogether.
>
> Again, Kate shouldn't really be a KDE application, because it's
> configuration needs doesn't fit into the desire of KDE to become GNOME :S
>
> (joke aside, how do we create a configuration dialog that suits our needs
> without a tree view? we can't group all the configuration pages of katepart
> into tabs, nor those of kate...)

I had a quick look at kate's config dialogue, and I don't see immediately why 
you think it isn't possible. Put simply, right now there's a two level 
hierarchy, treebranches, treenodes (= pages). Only one config page has more 
than one tab. Making the branches the top level items (i.e. those that show 
up in the iconview on the left) and having the branches as tabs makes sense 
to me. There's also some reorganisation possible, based on the suggestions in 
the HIG. Konqueror is probably even more work, as its settings are more 
complex (and it certainly doesn't help that it needs settings for 
filemanagement *and* webbrowsing).

It takes a bit of work, and probably more than one iteration to get it right  
(as in "user can find the relevant setting quickly" and "fits with other 
constraints, such as screen size, consistency across the rest of KDE"), but I 
do not doubt that the HIG provides very good guidelines for designing such a 
dialogue. It's not like the "old / current" dialogues stand out in terms of 
ease of use (neither konqueror's nor kate's). :>

If you really think that a treeview is ok there, there's probably something 
wrong with those guidelines, and that should be fixed. I don't think changing 
it for one application is the good way though, that gives us consistency 
issues across applications. As Matthias says,  the right place to discuss the 
HIG is probably the usability list, and the people there do need of people 
who can do meaningful work on it. "KDE wants to become GNOME" is probably not 
good enough as input, though. :P

Otherwise, I'd say that those guidelines should be seen as valuable input, and 
followed where they're explicit enough in their current version.
-- 
sebas

 http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org |  GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 
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