Konqueror 4

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 01 November 2006 12:15, Martin Konold wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, 1. November 2006 17:04 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
>
> Hi Aaron,
>
> thanks for provinging the screenshots.

np. trying to move things forward is all =)

> > > I find Gnome bread crumbs very restrictive and annoying most of
> > > the time.  And it takes up too much screen space.
>
> How shall the bread crumb implementation deal with deeply nested
> structures?

right now: poorly. it squishes entries so everything fits and this really 
falls down quickly. 

in a few days: when we run out of horizontal space all the entries that don't 
fit will 'collapse' into one button at the front which, when clicked, will 
drop down to show all the entries therein (i haven't decided yet how to 
present this; i've though about a straight popup but don't like that idea; 
i'm now considering a top-level window that dissapears when focus is lost 
with url bar buttons in it so look and behaviour continuity is kept)

this also implies that the widget will have a minimum width of 2 buttons (one 
for the '...' and one for the current directory name). i think this 
acceptable.

as a side note i implemented "network awareness" to the widget so that issue 
is getting resolved =) it has raised some interesting issues with protocol 
information that i'll raise in another thread in the next few days once i 
have tested the solution i've concocted a bit more ...

> Sorry but this bread crumb stuff is butt ugly.

beauty is in the eye of the beholder, i'll give you that.
i also have a hunch as to which is more appealing to the non-biased human eye 
(hint: it's not a line edit with file:///foo/bar/baz/blah/boo/bag)

however, i -do- think it could be made more attractive. i'm focussing on the 
functionality gaps first though. then i'll move to making it more attractive. 
then i'll make it more generic (it's a bit url centric atm)

> It took me a while to figure out why I intuitivly don't like it an I
> actually found out that breadcrumbs are violating(*) the semantics og
> buttons.
>
> (*) The semantics of buttons is that their meaning is independent from
> their position withing a button bar. Only the icon determines which action
> is associated with a button. Bread crumbs on the other hand violate this
> and are therefore confusing. E.g.

this is a misapplication of usability theory. for this to be true a few 
requirements would need to be met:

users need to identify these elements as push buttons. they are visually 
distinct in just about every way imaginable.

users would need to identify them individually rather than in context. given 
that there are no visual separators other than the arrows which actually 
serve to link them one after the other, i'm dubious on this point too (though 
i'm adding that to my usability testing plans now =)

a user familiar with the web will also stand a larger chance of recognizing 
the paradigm from web browsing. i read a study last week while researching 
these types of nav aids that noted that the effectivity of the bread crumb 
concept increases with user familiarity. so those who surf the web stand a 
higher chance of having experiences that would further mitigate the above.

> Imaginge /tmp/foo/bar/tmp/foo would lead to
>
> [tmp][foo}[bar}[tmp}[foo}
>
> So you end up with two buttons labled "tmp" and two buttons labled "foo".

which is identical to /tmp/foo/bar/tmp/foo for all intents and purposes in 
this case. i'll test this precise case anyways to see if urls with repeating 
path fragments and see what arises.

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

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://mail.kde.org/mailman/private/kfm-devel/attachments/20061101/6cdbbbbe/attachment.sig>