Final KDevelop 4.0 UI

[Niko Sams]

On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 11:55 AM, David Nolden <zwabel at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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.
I really like the tabs - they are very intuitive. Behind every tab a
individual activity is hidden.
Your second version is much better - as more correct.
However I would move them to the right. (So the default menubar isn't
changed that much)

> 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.
Discoverability is very important.
It could be prettier - but I like the general idea.

> 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.
What do we show there? filesystem-structure or namespace/class/method structure?
I'm not sure this has advantages over the project view. (except it
needs less space)

Niko