Bug 8333

Aaron J. Seigo aseigo at kde.org
Thu Mar 2 00:41:23 CET 2006


(after this reply, i'll only post to kde-usability-devel on the issue so as to 
avoid further cross-posting)

On Wednesday 01 March 2006 15:20, James Richard Tyrer wrote:ss
>  After considerable discussion, there is some support for two "home"
>  buttons although I do not think that it is yet a final decision.

what we're really working around here is that we don't have a proper 
distinction between "web browsing" and "file management" modes of using 
konqueror. if we actually had two UI arrangements tuned to each of these 
situations then we could keep our one button and use a profile-specific 
value.

advanced users could provide other UI arrangements (we call them profiles in 
kde3, right?) and extend the concept.

if we were continuing on with kde3 devel feature-wise this might be trickier. 
but as we are moving on with kde4 devel, it only makes sense in my mind to 
fix this properly instead of continuing to work around the problem.

thoughts?

>     Is having the "local home" button assigned to the "Documents" path OK?

no. GNOME recently tried this (or was it Ubuntu only? one or the other) and it 
was not received well because of how people actually use their computer.

personally, i'm strongly in favour of promoting $HOME as the starting point 
and providing a set of sensible defaults in there from which point the user 
can customize to their heart's content.

>  I don't think that using the house icon for the "web home" is a good
>  idea. 

agreed. what we could do is check to see what kind of URL it is and switch the 
icon based on that. we could sort out protocols between "local file", "remote 
file" and "intarweb" for instance and switch the icon based on that. i'd 
personally put http(s) and ftp(s) into the "intarweb" category together since 
that's a pretty common perception amongst users (the two intermingle pretty 
randomly). we can allow the user to customize the icon within the profile too 
if we wish, but differentiating between local files, remote files (e.g. fish, 
sftp, webdav, smb) and "the web" would likely do us well.

local and remote file Home icons should very very similar however. such as a 
house versus a house with a network pipe. essentially the base file 
management home icon + an emblem that adds more information.

>  It is also possible to have the menu string and icon for the local home
>  button change depending on whether it points to $HOME or
>  $HOME/<something else>.  This would be "way cool" but I have to ask if
>  it would violate the HIG since the icon and string for a menu item would
>  change depending on the user's configuration.

see above ... what do the other usability folk think?

>  Please make your suggestions and I will make appropriate changes to the
>  code in the patch.

are you working on trunk/ these days, both trunk/ and tweaking 3.5, or just 
3.5?

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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