[KPhotoAlbum] New features for testing and discussion

[Johannes Zarl]

On Tuesday 31 July 2012 08:10:58 Jesper K. Pedersen wrote:
> On Tuesday 31 July 2012 06:32:43 Miika Turkia wrote:
> > we have some new features on master branch, thanks mostly to Jesper.
> > Testing them out and providing some feedback would be appreciated
> > before pushing out a new release. Most of the work is related to
> > videos but e.g. SQL back-end has also been dropped and some internal
> > refactoring been done. There is also a new background process queue
> > with a blinkenlight on main window.

Apart from one crash (bug 303935) it all seems ok.

> > On discussion side, the annotation window is a bit annoying nowadays.
> > [...] The and/or selection is the only one that is specific to each
> > category and makes sense to have multiple times. On the other hand
> > only one set of buttons would be sufficient to select the display mode
> > and toggle search mode.

> I like to keep the buttons repeated, as it makes it more obvious that it is
> for those lists, than if they were located elsewhere in the window.

I find the button behaviour counter-intuitive, as well. Having them on the 
annotation dialog instead of the ListSelect would seem more natural to me. 

> > A new button "match word boundaries" is an independent toggle when the
> > original ones are like radiobuttons. 

We could also make this a radiobutton-like selection (and allow three match 
types: MatchFromBeginning, MatchFromWordStart, MatchContains). The only reason 
I did not do this from the start is that I wasn't sure how to 
present/integrate it in the user interface nicely.

> > Thus it might make sense to
> > differentiate it from the rest. It also seems to be buggy at least on
> > search mode. When I have e.g. a place Indonesia selected and click
> > that button, the whole place category list becomes empty and
> > re-clicking the button does not affect it. 

Thanks. I seem to have missed that one when testing.

> > Also the button has
> > opposite logic to what I expect intuitively. When clicked it matches
> > only from beginning, when unchecked it matches word boundaries. 

That's because you thought about it as "match word boundaries", and I wrote it 
as "match from beginning" ;-) I can definitely change this to provide the 
element of least surprise...

> > Of
> > course the default behavior is a matter of taste and changing the icon
> > from {} to ^ would also be sufficient for me.

I chose the "{}" icon because MatchFromBeginning effectively matches the whole 
tag name, whereas MatchFromWordStart splits the tag name. If you find a better 
icon in the standard KDE icon set, I'll be happy to use that instead.

> Johannes, this is your work, pleas work Miika to improve the usability of
> this. Please also add a tooltip to the button to explain what it does, 

Actually, there already is a tooltip. I'll also add a "what's this" to the 
button (and to the other buttons on the AnnotationDialog).

> and please find a better icon for it if possible. 
> I'm not even sure I
> understand what {} refers to.
See above.

> > One more thing to test out is the date based search. I changed it to
> > allow empty date field on either start or end of the search range. So
> > report back if you notice anything strange there.

A quick test shows nothing unusual. Having images without any date information 
show up on both kinds of open ended searches was a little strange at first, 
but certainly makes more sense than omitting them.


And now for something completely different: One refactoring on my backlog 
still is to pull out the DB part of KPA into its own library. On the other 
hand the dependencies from the DB to the GUI-part seem to grow rather than 
shrink. This begs my question: are other developers also interested in 
seperating the database part, or should I just fork the database code if I 
need a standalone library?

  Johannes