Konqueror 4

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 27 October 2006 16:16, Ellen Reitmayr wrote:
> Also, Holger Freyther volunteers to work on Konqueror. Holger, Florian and
> me just met and figured out some issues that need to be fixed - no
> fundamental changes but things that will make life with Konqueror easier.
> First thing Holger is going to address is the sidebar: see
> http://plasma.kde.org/wiki/index.php/Streamlining

interesting. ettrich, dfaure, ben meyer and myself met briefly on irc the 
other day to discuss the file manager in kde4.

the more i look at konqueror the more i wonder if we'll be able to truly pull 
off a "browser and a manager" application. the paradigms are so fundamentally 
different ....... 

one example is the location bar. it makes all the sense in the world to have a 
fully editable url bar as we do now for a browser (e.g. a web browser). but 
is it the most ergonomic thing in a file manager? hm.

something that came up in the conversation was the dolphin file manager[1]. we 
invited the primary author, peter penz, to join us in the conversation at 
some point. it's an interesting starting point for experimentation, if 
nothing else, since it has a small code base that is fairly cruft free. 
konqi's code base is considerably more daunting and less rewarding to 
experiment on.

i've put together a handful of patches for dolphin over the last 2 days 
(they're in svn[2] now) and peter is both responsive and aware of relevant 
issues. he's an interface designer by day, and that probably helps.

the negatives of working with dolphin include:

 - it's kde3; peter's expressed desire to port to kde4 sooner than later and 
it shouldn't be -too- hard. the interview stuff is probably the biggest bit.
 - there's a certain amount of features and polish missing that can be seen in 
konqueror. this is to be expected given the time put into konqi

the benefits include:
 - we have to ask ourselves about each inclusion
 - we don't have to be tempted with reworking rather than ripping out cruft 
like the sidebars as they don't exist in dolphin ;)
 - it's a much nimbler code base at this point

so the big question is: one browser+manager or one browser and one manager?
if the latter it may make sense to adopt dolphin at least as a test bed if not 
as an outright candidate for the role as manager. this would free us to work 
konqi into the best -browser- possible. (this is more about usage paradigms 
than what sort of content is viewed/managed; e.g. this isn't about turning 
konqi into web browser only or recreating the entire "embedded viewer" 
managerie as seen in konqi today in a separate application we call a "file 
manager")

for me, the biggest improvement targets for file management in kde4 include:

 - feedback (metadata, previews)
 - navigation (breadcrumbing, drop zones, integrated search)
 - covering fundamental use cases (near?) perfectly (d'n'd in konqi is quite 
poor righ tnow; this past week i painfully watched people try and deal with 
it. renaming needs to be dealt with smarter. etc...)

thoughts?

[1] http://enzosworld.gmxhome.de/
[2] https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/dolphinfileman

-- 
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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