Review Request 110276: Revamp the settings user interface

Fri May 3 13:21:13 UTC 2013

-----------------------------------------------------------
This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/110276/
-----------------------------------------------------------

(Updated May 3, 2013, 1:21 p.m.)

Review request for Telepathy, KDE Usability, David Edmundson, and Martin Klapetek.

Changes
-------

I added the access keys (I would never have noticed, thanks), and reordered the boxes in a way I think makes sense.

> At least the "now playing" edit field has a height without top/bottom space.
Sorry, I'm still not sure what you mean here. :(
It does have the same height like any other line edit, doesn't it?
I added a label to make it clear what the field even does (see new screenshot). I think the preset is reasonable enough so that people who consider it too complicated just don't have to touch it at all.

> My conclusion would be to prevent closing a window without any feature to reactivate. Or to confirm per dialog in case there to close means to shut down.
Yeah, I don't think the current behaviour is ideal either. However I think this is a different issue and should be discussed seperately. ;)

> What's about the idea to separate the "Now playing" stuff, with the benefit of room for support?
To be honest, I don't like it. It splits the dialog in two pages, which tends make it more difficult to find the option you're looking for quickly (given that the options would also fit on one page of course -- which they do).
Besides that, I agree that the "Now playing" thing looks a bit difficult at first glance, but if you look at it for a moment, from the preset "Now listening to %title by %artist from album %album" it should be pretty obvious how to modify the message the way you want it to look like. And if it's not obvious to someone, he doesn't have to touch it. To put it differently, I wouldn't even know what kind of instructions to put there... "%artist will be replaced by the artist of the currently played album"? Do you think that would help anyone (honest question, because I don't think it would)?

> More than 700x640?!
Heh, yes -- the first screenshot I posted shows the previous and new default size of the dialog.
I should maybe mention that this will only set the default size the dialog has when it first opens, so the user can still resize it if he wants.

> Isn't it possible to keep the size that users have adjusted?
Possible yes, but it needs extra code and I don't think it's worth it. This is the kind of settings dialog you use maybe once or twice per installation... when you start using the software, you use it to set the options you want once, and then you never look at it again. At least that's what I imagine (or how I would use it if I weren't working on its layout).

Thanks for your thoughts!
Cheers,
Sven

Description
-------

This patch revamps the settings UI of the kded module. Especially, it removes the "flat" flag from the group boxes, and also removes lots of spacers. But talk doesn't really help with UI changes, so you'd better look at the screenshot below ;)

Additionally, I'd like to add a dialog->resize(700, 640) to ContactListWidget::showSettingsKCM() in contact-list-widget.cpp in ktp-contactlist (the function which opens the dialog), but I don't want to open a seperate review for that.

Diffs (updated)
-----

  config/telepathy-kded-config.cpp 50c176d 
  config/telepathy-kded-config.ui 54ebc54 

Diff: http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/110276/diff/

Testing
-------

The settings dialog still seems to work fine.

File Attachments (updated)
----------------

Old (left) and new (right) settings dialog, with their respective default sizes
  http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/media/uploaded/files/2013/05/02/ktp-settings.png
new settings dialog as of diff revision 2
  http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/media/uploaded/files/2013/05/03/ktp-settings-new2.png

Thanks,

Sven Brauch

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-telepathy/attachments/20130503/fd75628b/attachment.html>