[Panel-devel] A better toolbox UI

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Friday 19 October 2007 22:08:12 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> 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.

The upper right corner is used for closing maximized application. I guess this 
isn't that big of a deal though.

> 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.

Yup, that would make sense.

> > - 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

That sounds much more usable. Dragging and dropping on a moving object was the 
one that I found hard to handle.

> - 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 realised that this sounded rather harsh. The meaning of this email was much 
more a "Hey can someone explain me how that is supposed to look like?" than 
anything else. Modulo my stupidity and inexperience.

The upper part of the email actually makes me pretty confident, those are 
pretty much all technical issues.

> 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.

I really didn't mean to stress this latter. I will have to mail you a personal 
voodoo doll. "Use anytime sebas is stretching it too far". If that doesn't 
help, I'll put a bottle of wine in the same package. :-)

As to the former, I do understand this frustration. Maybe this comes with 
being the Robby Williams (Andy Warhol, Jessica Rabbit, Rembrandt van Rijn) of 
Free Software, nice, popular and generally gorgeous. Just like KDE.

Otherwise, plasma is becoming pretty usable lately. This doesn't happen by 
itself and is not going unnoticed.
-- 
sebas

 http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org |  GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 
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