[KDE Usability] KMix UI orientation

[Trever Fischer]

On Thu, 2012-05-17 at 23:05 +0200, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> El Dijous, 17 de maig de 2012, a les 14:50:59, Trever Fischer va escriure:
> > I'm starting to have a look at a lot of the papercuts in kdemultimedia,
> > trying to polish up all the little details that bother me.
> > 
> > Here's my first question:
> > 
> > Does KMix really need vertical slider orientation?
> 
> To be honest i think the vertical orientation is very intuitive.

I agree, but squishing lots of text into a small horizontal space makes
it look pretty gnarly.

> 
> I click on the system, get the vertical thing, and immediately think I can use 
> the mouse wheel to "scroll vertically" and change the volume, try it, and 
> bang! it works :-)

Same can be said for scrolling the volume "up".

> 
> > 
> > How many people really feel that having two different layouts is a major
> > feature?
> > 
> > I've taken some screenshots of the two layouts, for reference:
> > 
> > Tray popup with horizontal: http://i.imgur.com/QrOuO.png
> 
> Though to be honest this is amazingly ugly. I don't get that, probably related 
> to my pulseaudio-lessity.
> 
> > Tray popup with veritcal: http://i.imgur.com/vwY8Q.png
> > 
> > Mixer dialog with horizontal: http://i.imgur.com/PTMLt.png
> > Mixer dialog with vertical: http://i.imgur.com/8AuMS.png
> > 
> > I propose removing the vertical layout entirely on the basis that it
> > makes the text look so super squished in there and takes up a *ton* of
> > space in the tray popup. With PulseAudio support, it is very common to
> > have really long labels, as you can see in my screenshots.
> > 
> > As far as I can tell, the only benefit a vertical layout provides to the
> > user is it makes it look like one of those 1980s equalizer boxes.
> > 
> > From a technical aspect, removing the vertical layout would clean up a
> > lot of the code.
> 
> Is it really that much code? One would think it'd be a QVBoxLayout vs a 
> QHBoxLayout and that's it.

Yeah, its a bit more than just switching a Qt layout. I'm certain that
could be solved with refactoring the code, and probably should.

If thats the case, how about making the horizontal layout default as an
alternative?

> 
> Cheers,
>   Albert
> 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > kde-usability mailing list
> > kde-usability at kde.org
> > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability
> _______________________________________________
> kde-usability mailing list
> kde-usability at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability