[Panel-devel] A better toolbox UI

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 19 October 2007, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> I'm still not getting the purpose of this thing. I hope you can relief my
> doubts about this piece of the plasma UI:

sure.

> - It's in the top-right corner, which already is used for two things (in my
>   setup): Closing an application and kwin's expose effect

show me how this interferes with closing an application and i'll provide an 
answer to that.

kwin's expose effect: that's a really shitty conflict indeed. i'll have to 
talk with the kwin boys about it.

> - With the old toolbox, as soon as something ends up behind this thing,
> it's very frustrating getting it back.

there's a reason the old one is gone, and why this one is in the upper right 
corner. we could also probably provide an occlusion area ensuring that 
widgets never end up permanently behind it.

> - In the old toolbox, it sometimes got hard to handle it. The toolbox would
>   slide out as soon as the mouse left the area, which happend rather often,
>   especially when scrolling

which is why:

- there will only be clickable buttons that bring up other pieces of UI in the 
toolbox
- we aren't using a QWidget but a QGraphicsItem this time (well, that and the 
flicker the widget induced)

> I'd be happy to be shown the rationale behind this funny way of putting a
> UI somewhere.

i'm not even sure why i should have to answer this, other than as a way to use 
my time and try my patience.

i'm sorry you all had to put up with the old toolbox for so long. i said from 
day ONE that it was a TEMPORARY way for people (particularly myself) to get 
at development and debugging tools. i'm sorry that it is confusing for people 
to grasp the concepts i'm working with or to disentangle "temporary, 
debugging purpose" from "now we're working on something usable" in your mind.

but i'm really not prepared to justify myself to everyone every day, day after 
day. you have no idea how many times i've been ready to just walk away from 
maintainership of this project and say "ok, you guys figure it out." due to 
this.

maybe ask the people who were at dev days just how stupid the design concepts 
are, as we got to have a really nice in person talk about and demo of it all. 
but i'm really not prepared to spend another day's energy being grilled about 
things online or educate the Nth person on various ideas of UI theory. i've 
lost too many weeks of time, energy and motivation to that.

it's pretty obvious why free software ends up being the same boring shit over 
and over again, because to do anything interesting requires that you either 
tell everyone to fuck off (because they won't get it until they see it 
anyways, and until then they just pester you) or have the patience of a saint 
(to deal with the constant and irreverent barrage).

i don't want to do the former and i really don't know if i have the latter.

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

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
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