Session manager kcm - some options outdated?

[Robert Knight]

> If you can find a way to detect if the user is using another launcher that
> supports the features
...
> This allows people that like
> the "classic" menu to have the behaviour they are used to work, while not
> causing confusion for kickoff users.

The 'classic' menu and Kickoff are the same code.  The difference is
the widget used to display the models (QMenu vs a custom item view).
If you implement the feature in one you'll get it in the other very
easily.

Having different feature sets between the two is not a good idea.  It
can only cause confusion.

> I guess I'll just contact kickoff maintainer and chat about putting "Save Session" in some kickoff tab.

Kickoff doesn't have a maintainer as such.  I wrote the original code
but the interface 'design' was just copying
SuSE's KDE 3 version.

On a general note, my impression is that users are quite divided over
Kickoff/Classic.  A recent Mandriva poll to find the
default for KDE 4 did I think come out slightly in favor of Kickoff
but it was pretty even Kickoff/Classic.  Frankly
I think that having multiple launchers shipped out of the box is
something I'd like to avoid.
If there are design flaws in Kickoff we should fix them, or even find
something else altogether and focus our
efforts on it.  I'd much rather have one really slick, intuitive
launcher with good data backing it up than a whole
bunch of 'okay-ish' ones.
We have no problem coding up a launcher, that's easy.  The basic code
for Kickoff was usable after a week.
The problem is getting a design, testing with users and getting some
hard data on how well it works.  Suse
did that and this is why I used their design.  However, while I
personally find it much better in use that
the classic menu, not everyone agrees and I don't know whether that is
'fixable' in the design or not, or
whether we have two very different classes of user whose needs are not
easily satisfiable with a single design.
I had a suspicion that we'd need to revisit the UI and that is why
Kickoff is split up into core/UI the way it is and
designed to allow for changes to the way it works.

If anyone has idea on how we could do an improved or new design for
KDE 4.3 I'd be happy to help with the implementation
but a few screenshots on kde-look.org won't do.

Thoughts anyone?

Regards,
Robert.

2008/10/16 Dmitry Suzdalev <dimsuzkde at gmail.com>:
> On Thursday 16 October 2008 10:42:47 Gary Greene wrote:
>> If you can find a way to detect if the user is using another launcher that
>> supports the features, leave it in and then if the feature isn't supported
>> by the given menu being used, hide them. This allows people that like the
>> "classic" menu to have the behaviour they are used to work, while not
>> causing confusion for kickoff users.
> I'm not sure this is implementable.
> Launchers are wrapped by plasma applets nowadays, so the user can have both
> kickoff and old-style kmenu applets sitting in the panel.
> I don't know what to do in this situation :)
>
> I guess I'll just contact kickoff maintainer and chat about putting "Save
> Session" in some kickoff tab.
> And then I'll try to make shutdown/logout/etc dialog highlight an action
> selected in session management kcm when this dialog is invoked in
> Ctrl-Alt-Del mode (when it invoked from kickoff it already has some action
> highlighted).
>
> Does this sound ok? :)
>
> Cheers,
> Dmitry.
>
>