KIO slaves wizard

[Dik Takken]

On Sun, 7 Nov 2004, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:

>> Worse, you can't paste urls anymore.
>
> KURL has all the abilities built it to parse out pasted strings into protocol
> and "the rest" .. so this is not a problem.
>
>> Please refrain from splitting any address bars.

I hereby officially declare this idea shot. :)

> what i think _would_ do it (and why i haven't said anything because i'm not up
> to coding this right now) is a cutsom combobox what would provide a "drop
> down arrow" right INSIDE the edittable area. this widget would behave,

That would just be perfect, but I have no idea about what's technically 
possible and what not. Apparently, this is possible. :)

> a bigger issue, however, is the meaning of protocols. even the proposed wizard
> does nothing for this problem, which is the true root of the issue. i mean,
> what IS irc6 or finger or fish? well, sure, WE might know, but the users that
> need this extra help don't.

What are you trying to say? Even a protocol-dropdown won't work because 
users don't even know what 'fish' is? How about the idea of adding a short 
description to each entry in the list, like 'browse files on a remote 
computer' in case of the fish protocol?

> we don't need more, baroque interfaces (such as wizards for constructing
> something as basic as an address), what we need are:
>
> 	0. more human friendly ways of describing addresses. raw URL parts are too
> technical.

Could you please explain what you have in mind? The only thing I can think 
of that does not require the user to type/select fish://.. is some sort of 
a virtual file system that allows the user to reach all KIO slaves by 
click-navigating through the VFS and type a hostname when leaving the 
local machine.

> 	1. subtle UI elements that are provided as part of traditional-looking
> elements that provide aid without getting in the way or making things look
> more complex.

Does QT 4 have more of these subtle elements (like the one you described 
above) or do we need to code our own custom widgets?

Dik