[Parley-devel] Some ideas after a 1st test of parley on OSX

[Marko Käning]

Hi devs,

I had a lengthy discussion with Inge about some findings made during a 1st test drive with Parley,
and the result was that I should post these here on Parley’s devel ML.

We've tested the latest version 1.1.1 on OSX installed via MacPorts, specifically the following git
versions [1]:

	libkdeedu-devel	bc315695d2dc1ecdb16ec18984c3f27f194becb9
	parley-devel	8b6b1a1b711c2056ba926d36755ef4bb02f60c09

with the following findings (without prioritisation):


 1) There is no information in its main dialog if the file has been changed (dirty flag, somewhere
    easily visible).

 2) The method selection could determine whether certain actions are possible for selected unit(s).

 3) Written exercise: it stays unclear into which direction the translation has to be carried out!
    The gui should tell the user for every flash-card e.g. D->E or E->D, otherwise one might run
    into ambiguous situation like these (“Roman”->”novel" or “Roman”->”Römer”).

 4) Practicing written words: lists of correct answers are hard to remember, as the order has to be
    recalled exactly with the correct punctuation. Instead Parley should somehow understand that
    multiple answers are possible and should also weight the answers correspondingly.

 5) Sometime it is unclear whether the program asks for a noun or a verb or whatever else! But this
    could also be caused by imperfect data files…

 6) An Android and perhaps even an iOS client would be very nice.

 7) Confidence level status synchronisation with other instances, ideally even on other platforms
    (Linux, OSX, Android, iOS).

 8) "Request Correction”-button as well as “Submit Correction”-button allowing the user to contact
    and support the collection data maintainer actively in order to improve the data quality.

 9) While khotnewstuff sometimes tries to download a data file it might fail to do so. The error
    message displayed then might be longer than the dialog's status line and thus not be fully
    readable - leaving the user clueless concerning the reason. *

10) Some downloads recommend to open the downloaded file with the web browser, which is irritating.

11) The collection tiles editor should have a short title, so that the collection maintainer is
    forced to think about final rendering of Parley's start page. Short and descriptive naming
    of collections is key!

12) Parley should layout tiles according to the actual dialog width and not only fixed three
    columns wide.

13) Accessing Parley’s “Preferences” menu item in OSX’s main menu via “parley/Preferences…” crashes
    the application. Choosing “Settings/Configure Parley…”, however, works just fine!

14) The text “Practice Anyway”’s font in the the main dialog can be too wide, so that the text
    gets clipped left and right. *

15) There is a small clipping of the button’s bottom part for the 1st collection. *

16) The application icon doesn’t appear in the dock when the app is not running. (But it is in dock
    an app selection while being executed.) It is very likely that the correct icon size is missing.
    On OSX almost only the "KDE Games” ship all the right icon in the required resolutions, i.e. on
    OSX most apps don’t display their app icons when they’re not started. *

17) The collections should be selectable to clicking on text lines, image and corresponding button.

18) There is a severe shadow rendering issue on OSX [2].

19) Removing confidence levels from a unit and going back to the dashboard doesn’t save these to
    file. The user should be warned about that a “CTRL+S” is advisable or needs to actively discard
    the changes made [3].


Greets,
Marko


    *) Screenshots can be supplied at request.



 [1] http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=macports-kde.git&a=commit&h=c607da1fe132cb5e02cdc27786e65b9c11a22770
 [2] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341138
 [3] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341139