KDevelop 4.0 UI

[David Nolden]

***
I sent this mail this morning, but it didn't arrive to the ML because of 
attachments. Now you've seen v2.0 before. But looking at it again, I think I 
like this more then v2.0, even if it's less correct. Well, I'm not sure 
actually.

So here the mail again:
****

Just by the way, the area switchers still don't work here.

But meanwhile I've thought a bit how the area switching could be made more 
intuitive, and how we could put together the components we have/will have into 
a neat UI.

In these mockups you see the results.

Since when you switch between areas, you essentiall switch _everything_ below, 
including tool-views and files, I think tabs are the most natural and 
intuitive way of expressing this.

Then at the right side of those area-tabs there should be the tool-bar. By 
default it should contain very few, but useful actions. "Save" should be the 
only standard action there, apart from that we should add a bunch of tool-
buttons that are really useful, like "build", "debug", or something like that.

Also as part of the toolbar, there should be a quickopen line, to increase 
discoverability of quickopen. As soon as the user starts typing into it, it 
should expand, and show the usual quickopen user interface.

Then, there could be the breadcrumb implementation we have. It cannot replace 
the tabs, but it is useful as an additional knowledge source for "where am 
I?", and allows switching to related files using the mouse.

I think with this layout, we have a very nice user interface. Quite a bit of 
functionality, and no wasted space.

http://zwabel.wordpress.com/files/2009/05/mockup.png
http://zwabel.wordpress.com/files/2009/05/mockup_with_quickopen.png


Greetings, David