[Parley-devel] Welcome Screen

Daniel Laidig d.laidig at gmx.de
Sat Jul 19 17:49:37 CEST 2008


Hi,

the last few days I started working on a welcome screen for Parley and now 
I've come to a point where it makes sense to show some screenshots and 
discuss about it. (The cool thing about screenshots is that you don't see 
that all the buttons don't do anything yet...)

http://daniel-laidig.de/temp/2008/07/parley-welcome-screen.png

The aim of the welcome screen is to make it easy to get started, create new 
documents and load recent files and so on and of course to create a better 
default appearance for Parley (showing an empty table view just doesn't look 
like fun).

The welcome screen should be simple and easy to use which is why it only 
contains basic options. It can create new documents, open files and provides 
a more visible access to GHNS. With the Goya-powered list of recent files you 
need just one click to load files and -- as a new feature -- directly start 
practicing without bothering you with the Vocabulary editor.

When disussing this with Frederik there was one big issue where we both have 
different opinions, therefore some more ideas on this topic would be helpful: 
I would like to integrate the welcome screen into the main window of Parley 
as you can see it in the screenshot (replacing the QTableView until a 
document is opened) while Frederik prefers to have a separate top level 
window (without the toolbars etc).

Here is why I prefer integrating the welcome screen:
- Having the toolbar available still allows "old" behaviour (for example using
  the file menu for opening files). This might also be easier to access with
  the keyboard (especially opening recent files).
- Having a separate window would make Parley have three different top level
  windows (Welcome, Editor, Practice) of which only one is visible at the same
  time. IMHO this creates confusion and makes Parley less easy and predictable
  to use. I hate it when an application window suddenly disappears and gets
  replaced by another window. This is also the case for the Practice window,
  but I think in this case it really makes sense.
- Directly showing the main window in contrast to a "welcome window" creates
  some sort of identity as an application (which is hard to describe). It also
  feels more like an KDE application (which usually don't constantly switch
  between main windows). In my approach the welcome screen would just be a
  useful non-intrusive placeholder for the vocabulary editor.
- Different windows have different geometries, which makes Parley feel 
  inhomogeneous.

There are a few small issues I would like to discuss:
- Of course there will be an option to enable the old behavior (restoring the
  last opened document).
- I think there should be some way to access the welcome screen again after
  loading a document (other than restarting Parley). My plan is to add
  a "Close" action to the file menu, just like many KDE applications do.
- Frederik suggested to use the term "Collection" to describe a kvtml
  document, because "File" or "Document" are meaningless and suck. ;)
  I did this in the welcome screen, but obviously all the other occurrences in
  Parley will also have to be renamed. Are there any objections (or even
  better terms) for this?

@Carsten: I'm CC'ing you because Frederik told me that you had probably some 
ideas about this. :)

Daniel


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