making kickoff have full-width selection rects (on hover)

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 27 February 2008, Will Stephenson wrote:
> * it's consistent with every other selectable item on the desktop, but

you are using kmail. look at the selection of a threaded item in the header 
list. so .. no. it's not.

> especially pulldown menus.

and pulldown menus have headers, search edits, tabs and disk usage bars? 
kickoff is as much a menu as krunner is.

> * conversely, only highlighting the text could give the impression that the
> text is something separate to the icon.

did you think that? have you found someone who has?

> * other menus also display icons and other elements without colour
> clashing.

again, you're using kmail. start a mail, open the edit menu, mouse over Undo 
and, if you're using the default oxy colour scheme, tell me that there isn't 
a wonderful clash of blue on blue.

and that's not something that you are going to sit there and read through and 
which isn't 32px+ in size.

when the highlight was behind the icon, i often found it just fugly: konqi's 
icon is esp bad there.

> Fuel gauges in items are a solvable problem 

?

> * highlights are supposed to be eyecatching:

yes, that's really the whole point. and why? to draw the eye to the importance 
of the selected item. this has nothing to do with being full width, however. 
not in the least. why do i say that? because notice that nobody is saying "i 
can't figure out which item is highlighted".

and if you are thinking about reply with "maybe they just haven't said it" 
don't even bother because prior to 4.0 we did have a hard-to-notice highlight 
and guess what feedback we got, hard and heavy? yep: "i can't figure out 
which item is highlighted."

so the current system is indeed effective in the real world, whic mean this is 
basically a discussion about usability for something that that works making 
it really a discussion mostly about aesthetics. =)

there are things in kickoff that are not working for people (speaking of 
which, i need to make the new "breadcrumbs" clickable; binner is scheduled to 
work on the free resize thing ... and your tab top/bottom/left/right patch 
helps there as well). it'd be cool to concentrate a bit more on those things 
instead imho.

and if we really want to improve the look 'n feel, doing something about the 
fugly frame would be a decent idea.

> * a full width highlight doesn't cramp the item it highlights, a bit of
> empty space between the borders of the highlight and its contents makes the
> whole thing easier on the eye

strawman, as that was never an issue.

> * a full width highlight doesn't create the impression of a jumble of
> differently sized rectangles whilst mousing over a list of items

given that it maps directly to the size of the thing being highlighted ... 

and again, highlighting semantically useless space in a way that emphasizes it 
seems rather fun.


i half suspect that eventually one of the people standing behind the "full 
width!" idea will actually produce a patch with a full width highlighting 
that is acceptable in terms of not being eye catching in the extreme, having 
very low colour saturation, looking pretty and not interfering with either 
the text or drawing one to the "vast ocean of emptyness" between the text and 
the edge of the menu.

until that point this is really a useless conversation.

-- 
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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