new NM design: UI considerations

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi,

While reading Lamarque's blog at 

http://lamarque-lvs.blogspot.com/2011/10/solid-sprint-day-3.html

a few things struck me. First, I think it's really good to see design 
considerations of such a central part of the users' workflows. I especially 
like the usecases you used. I'm not sure, however, that everything we need it 
for has been considered, specifically touch-screen friendliness seem to regres 
with the proposed design. Those are UI-related things we considered when 
designing the two-paneled pop-up. It seems they've not been taken into account 
when designing the current, one-paneled view. The main issue I see with the 
proposed design is the use of the context menu, which has some problems:

* options in there are hard to discover, impossible for some users
* if you use both RMB and LMB on the panel icon, it gets confusing: just 
  look at how nm-applet handles this, it's pretty bad, one always has to 
  search for the options
* RMB doesn't work on touch-screens

So I understand that you moved those in the context menu because the main UI 
becomes too big, too crowded. I do not think that it's an option, however.

The NM plasmoid has been designed with use on touchscreens in mind, and we're 
actually relying on it for Plasma Active (where there is no context menu). 
Implementing these changes would basically make het Plasmoid unusable for us, 
and we had to maintain a fork of the current version -- nobody wants that.

I suggest to wait with these UI changes until we've found good solutions for 
them, and to not rush the redesign. It's maybe not the most elegant thing in 
the world, but there's plenty of opportunity to improve the workflow by 
polishing the flows through the QWidget-based parts. No need to hurry here.

Here's a proposal: As you know, I've started working on a QML-based version of 
the NM Plasmoid. This should make it future-proof (wrt Frameworks 5 and 
libplasma2), and solve many small layout problems (GraphicsWidget's sizing is 
a lot more wonky than QML's layouts). I suggest UI changes happen in there, 
and we do it in a way that works both on desktop and touch. It's also way 
easier to experiment with different layouts in QML than in C++. Furthermore, 
it's a lot easier to make the UI more attractive and fluid by adding subtle 
transition effects. Let's use this as starting point for the redesign of the 
main panel, work on the QWidget-based pieces first. This will save us another 
rewrite of the UI in the not-so-far future. Mid-term, we need to get rid of 
QGraphicsWidgets anyway, which are heavily used in the current Plasmoid.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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