Kopete Usability

[Nick Tryon]

On 1/2/06, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> On Monday 02 January 2006 10:33, P Botha wrote:
> > - When kopete is open in desktop X and the user is working on desktop Y and
> > left-click on the kopete icon. The view automatically changes to desktop X.
> > Would it be reasonable to ask that kopete is transfered to the active
> > desktop?
>
> this was actually a change i made to the system tray implementation in kde,
> and quite purposefully. if the system tray has a window associated with it,
> then it switches to the desktop of that window just as if you clicked on the
> taskbar. it also prevents annoyances like clicking on the mail icon and
> kmail/kontact being switched to the current desktop, which is almost never
> the desired case. (ditto for media players like amarok).

I would disagree on this last point.  Kmail/kontact is something I
want to keep on a particular desktop, but there are times when I just
want to quickly see something with amaroK and then dismiss it again
and go back to what I was doing.  If I wanted to go to the desktop
that currently had amaroK on it, I'd use the taskbar entry.

There was a relatively lengthy discussion about this in #amaroK back
when the behavior changed in KDE 3.4.  I think the conclusion was that
the "bring it to me" vs. "bring me to it" behavior was a learned quirk
rather than the best behavior in terms of usability.  I don't remember
whether consistancy was brought up, but that could be an issue,
whether or not one behavior might be better than the others in a
particular case.

I've mostly gotten used to the current behavior, although I do use
amaroK's win+P global shortcut for the "bring it to me" behavior and
the taskbar or systray entry for the "bring me to it" behavior.  I'm
not sure if kopete has something similar.  I personally keep my
contact list window fairly small and the graphics to a minimum and
then sticky it so that it's on all desktops.  (right-click on the
taskbar entry > "To Current Desktop" is also an option, albeit a
slightly slower one)