Review Request: Make default presence variants not bold, use italic font to visually distinguish special presence variants.

Tue Jun 26 13:50:34 UTC 2012


> On June 25, 2012, 11:48 a.m., Martin Klapetek wrote:
> > First of all thanks for a perfect review request! That's how they all should be done ;)
> > 
> > As for the change - I'm not in favor. Truth is that the bold font looks bad, but the italics looks a bit worse for my eyes. I'd like to do two things here - Nikita, please add Usability group in the review groups. To all others - try brainstorming some ideas here how we can separate these (do we need it at all?).
> 
> Kai Uwe Broulik wrote:
>     As far as I can tell the custom presence messages still include a status such as "Away" or "Busy"?
>     So we could add a custom delegate to the combobox to have it in two-rows. A bigger icon on the left and the generic term as heading and if available a custom subtitle below it. Similar to e.g. Plasma does for the Wallpaper Plugin.
>     See here: http://privat.broulik.de/plasmacustomdelegate.png
>     I think in this example the bold font doesn’t look bad at all. It just looks out of place if the font size is the regular dialog font size.
> 
> Martin Klapetek wrote:
>     That looks good, thanks for the idea!
>     
>     > the custom presence messages still include a status such as "Away" or "Busy"
>     
>     Nope, the "Away", "Busy" etc is replaced by the custom presence message itself, see the "After" screenshot above.
>     
>     > So we could add a custom delegate to the combobox to have it in two-rows
>     
>     I think this would be really nice. Anyone interested in doing a mockup/stealing that code and putting presences in it?
> 
> Nikita Skovoroda wrote:
>     > http://privat.broulik.de/plasmacustomdelegate.png
>     
>     Isn't the icon good enough for that?
>     
>     What will be on the first row and what will be on the second?
>     
>     If no custom message means no second row, then i don't like if by default (with no custom presences) there would be only huge 2-row variants with big icons and empty second rows.
>     That's just wrong.
> 
> Martin Klapetek wrote:
>     First row would always be the presence name, second the presence message (if present). I'll do a mockup tomorrow so we can see how it would look like. Might turn out it's not good at all ;)
> 
> Nikita Skovoroda wrote:
>     This is what i mean: http://wstaw.org/m/2012/06/25/status0.png (based on the image above).
>     
>     Also, that example has bad rowsize: the row height is about 60px.
>     That will be around 480px high dropdown select, with the default number of statuses (6 + 2 special).
>     4 custom presences would make that 720px and that won't fit nicely in 1366x768 (don't forget about window headers, the panel, etc.), which is common for 12" notebooks.
>     That would mean another scrollbar in a place which works perfectly without a scrollbar. I don't like it.
>     
>     Yes, it can be made smaller that on the original (mockup: http://wstaw.org/m/2012/06/25/status1.png), but that would still look too empty if no special presences are set.
>     And the status icons are quite simple, having big icons with little visual differences (mostly in color) doesn't look very good to me.
>     Maybe, collapse them to single-row, if there is no custom presences?
> 
> Nikita Skovoroda wrote:
>     Fixed link: http://wstaw.org/m/2012/06/25/status1.png
> 
> Martin Klapetek wrote:
>     Nice work! Thanks a lot.
>     
>     I agree with most of your arguments. As such, it wouldn't be too good.
>     
>     Here's a question - Do we actually need to visually separate those things?
> 
> Nikita Skovoroda wrote:
>     There is a larger question: is there a need in unchangable «default» statuses with no presence message?
>     Look how it's handeled in kopete.
>     
>     In short, the default statuses are also editable, so there is completely no need to separate them from custom statuses.
>     And the special entries are separated using a horizontal splitter line.
> 
> Nikita Skovoroda wrote:
>     That allows, for example, to have only one «away» status with custom presence message.
>     That's not allowed by ktp, the only way to have a custom «away» presence message is to have at least two «away» statuses.
> 
> Bjoern Balazs wrote:
>     Sorry for the possibly stupid question: What are the two states that get visually separated by the two fonts? I concluded 'default' vs. 'personal' statuses - is that correct?
> 
> Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
>     I agree the bold font is too heavy, but I actually believe there is no real need to distinguish between custom and default statuses. I would just use the regular font for all status texts.
>     
>     Slightly off-topic: the left column looks crowded IMO, because the icons are all stuck to each others. I think it would look much nicer if the row height were slightly increased so that there are 2 or 3 pixels between the status icons.

Keeping offtopic discussion separate at: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=302560


- David


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On June 25, 2012, 7:50 p.m., Nikita Skovoroda wrote:
> 
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> This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/105348/
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> 
> (Updated June 25, 2012, 7:50 p.m.)
> 
> 
> Review request for Telepathy and KDE Usability.
> 
> 
> Description
> -------
> 
> The bold font looks bad, especially if there is no custom presences (then almost all variants are bold).
> 
> Changes done by the patch:
> 1) global-presence-chooser.cpp — make special presences italic.
> 2) presence-model.cpp — make presences without status message not bold.
> 3) presence-model.cpp — make presences with status message italic.
> 
> This replaces «normal» font with «italic», and «bold» with «normal» in the presence shooser.
> 
> Looks better to me.
> 
> 
> Diffs
> -----
> 
>   global-presence-chooser.cpp 6729f51 
>   presence-model.cpp 72bfc3d 
> 
> Diff: http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/105348/diff/
> 
> 
> Testing
> -------
> 
> Does not break anything. The result is on the screenshots.
> 
> This does not break visual separation of different status groups, when there are a lot of custom presences (the bold entries separated them) — they can be easily distingushed thanks to the icons.
> 
> 
> Screenshots
> -----------
> 
> Before
>   http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/105348/s/608/
> After
>   http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/105348/s/609/
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Nikita Skovoroda
> 
>

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