new NM design: UI considerations

[Lukáš Tinkl]

On Čt 6. října 2011 10:57:11 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> 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,

That pretty much sums up my thoughts as well; what about we do all the 
intrusive UI redesign in a separate branch? I like some of the ideas but if we 
do it, we should really opt for QML and keep the mobile/touch limitations in 
mind.

-- 
Lukáš Tinkl <ltinkl at redhat.com>
Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno
KDE developer <lukas at kde.org>
Red Hat Inc.                               http://cz.redhat.com