[Kde-games-devel] kbattleship and welcome screen

[Johannes Bergmeier]

On Tuesday 12 June 2007, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Tuesday 12 June 2007, Paolo Capriotti wrote:
> > That's not the main point of my rambling, though. The interface can be
> > simplified, and we already started working on this, but imho even a
> > simplified interface will have the flaws I've tried to describe here.
> > My proposal is to forget about integrated welcome screens, at least for
> > kbattleship, and to add a normal dialog acting as a welcome screen (like
> > ksudoku, iirc).
> 
> well, ksudoku's entry screen is not a very good example. it presents 2 
> groupboxes (nested!) with 6 widgets just to go in an play a simple game... 
> it -feels- heavy. kbattleship also provides 6 widgets but it feels fun and 
> easy. the latter is certainly what the games should be aiming for, imho.
> 

in my opinion you are right on ksudokus welcome screen. We started designing 
it over 3 times now but it is still far from perfect. im currently the one 
who does most of the work on it, so i'm personally not the best person for 
testing. but when playing ksudoku i realized the following:

1) i use that difficulty slider rather seldom, although i need it far more 
often than an average user. i think we can simply move that config to the 
settings menu.

2) i change often the game i play, quite more often than for example in kpat. 
sometimes i play 10 or more games and change back and forth between samurai, 
jigsaw and xsudoku. i don't know whether i'm the only person doing this. but 
if i'm not the list of different games should stay.

3) getting new games will be used rather seldom so i don't think it needs a 
button on the welcome screen. it can either go in the config dialog, the 
settings menu or be another option on the game list.

only 4 widgets in one groupbox are left. the playbutton is obviously needed 
(at least as long as we have the games in a QListWidget). the configure can 
go either into the config-dialog or be embedded into the list widget (as a 
icon for each entry as in johann's mockup or "more options" link in the 
control module for kwineffects). but this has another usability problem: ever 
tried to use kcmshell kwineffects with keyboard only?

one button left: start empty. i don't know what to do with this one. most 
people would never need it as they play only ksudoku-created-games. but 
others will need it quite often for solving sudokus from newspapers etc.

so has anybody suggestions what's the right way to go?

Josel

---
Johannes.Bergmeier at gmx.net
Jabber: joselb at jabber.org
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