Kickoff patch review

[Michael Rudolph]

On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 10:14 AM, Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 01 April 2008, Rafael Fernández López wrote:
>  > So, please, since this patch gets too many new features for kickoff, I
>  > would ask for you to tell me what you would vote for it to get in, so I can
>  > precisely clean up the patch and just commit the parts that almost
>  > everybody agrees.
>  >
>  > - New background look.
>  i also think it looks really smurfs :( but i think it's a problem that should
>  eventually be resolved at lower level maybe?
>
> > - Search hides tabbars (please note that instead of hiding, we could add
>  > another tabbar with only one tab "Search Results" so this would be more
>  > intuitive, despite that we would have less room for the results
>  > themselves).
>  less intuitive way to exit from search maybe?
>
> > - Search highlights the first match so users only need to
>  > click enter.
>  like it:)
>
> > - Mouse tracking is strict. No item is hovered if the mouse is
>  > not over an item (except on the search, of course, if point 3 is accepted).
>  like also that
>
> > - Pressing Up/Down on keyboard when no selection is made selects the last
>  > and first items respectively.
>  +1
>
> >
>  >
>  > So, that's it I think. Let me know your thoughts.
>  >
>  >
>  > Bye and thanks,
>  > Rafael Fernández López
>  >

Hello everyone,

yay, Kickoff-bashing.

So many smart people, yet so few smart ideas.

I will neither pretend to be smart, nor to have smart ideas. But I'm a
little crazy and this might help derail others just enough, so they
can start forming the right ideas.

I don't need Kickoff, I didn't need Kmenu, and I don't even need
applications. No one needs application launcher interfaces.

I'm not sure if this is part of the current discourse in this field,
(if not, it perhaps should be) but the important question, to me,
seems to be: what are the atoms of interaction in a computer user
interface? I hold that applications and files are not, or better:
should not be, the atoms. They are, to stay with the metaphor, the
quarks software developers use to build the atoms. Signs of the
inappropriateness of applications are the use of virtual desktops,
that can be used to group applications together for certain
activities. Activities might be a nice candidate for an user interface
atom. Also IDEs are an indicator; loads of functionality, whole
applications even, are bundled together to form a piece the user can
actually use. He gets project management, a terminal, file management,
compilers, deguggers, documentation and previews (you all know this
better than I do). Everything to complete a given task. Perhaps tasks
are another candidate.

So why is my desktop not just a mind map of all the digital things in
my life? There's a cluster for work and one for university and below
that, there are clusters for all my seminars. So if I wanted to write
a paper for university, I'd just create a subitem at the appropriate
place. Or if I had another big-mouthed proposal for plasma, I'd create
an item in the KDE cluster. What happens when I zoom in on a specific
item is left to your imagination, but believe me, some very smart
things are possible. No, wait! Crazy things! :-)

So to recapitulate, we shouldn't present applications to users in such
a way; and whether we use ugly listviews to do so, or even more ugly
ones is actually not that important.

I'm sorry if this is not very helpful for the task at hand, but as I
said initially, perhaps my comments can at least spur some creativity.

michael