[Kamoso] Kamoso UI contribution

Andrew Lake jamboarder at gmail.com
Thu Jan 6 21:26:03 CET 2011


Alex F and Alex P,

This is a follow up to our offline email exchange.

Thanks again for your work on Kamoso and I'm looking forward to
finally having a solid KDE webcam app!

I've attached a before and after screenshot of the proposed minor UI
updates mentioned in the email as well as a patch.
I've provided a summary of the rationale for the changes.  (It is not
intended as a criticism of the UI - just rationale meant in a
positive, constructive sense.)

Screenshot before: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?e3a04d49a9.jpg
Screenshot after: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?458e04776c.jpg

A quick summary of the rationale for the changes:
It appeared that the proximity of the mode buttons to each other,
along with the white space, provides sufficient information to imply
that they are functionally related.  So it seemed reasonable remove
the visual groupbox which seemed to have a relatively low information
value.  The same goes for the groupbox on the right.

The groupbox in the middle surrounding the trigger button was removed
since it also appeared to have a relatively low information value as
it only contained 1 item.  To reduce the number of visual
alignments/"lines" vertically, the trigger button is now anchored to
the horizontal center of the camera image and the button groups to the
right and left edge of the camera image.

Since one of the primary use-cases is for the user to take a
picture/pictures/video, it seemed like the trigger button needed the
highest interaction impulse - so all other buttons were switched to
autoraised toolbutons (the icons by themselves probably provide
sufficient interaction impulse). This leaves the camera image and the
trigger button(as well as the image strip) as the primary interface
elements supporting the primary use-cases.

If you welcome these changes, I'd like to solicit feedback from small
selection of our KDE usability folks for this before final submission.

Hope this helps and please let me know if you have any questions!

peace and much respect,
Andrew Lake
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