Kickoff multiple columns

[Luiz Felipe Talvik]

2008/7/31 Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org>:
> On Thursday 31 July 2008, Luiz Felipe Talvik wrote:
>> http://www.comp.ufscar.br/~talvik/kickoff/screenshot4.png
>> http://www.comp.ufscar.br/~talvik/kickoff/screenshot5.png
> in this one, documents is on the first tab. i have to say that i much prefer
> the look in #4, even if it would mean adding a scrollbar... hm.
I'll have to disagree on that. If I changed the rule to prefer one
section per column,
there would be situation in which both looks and usability would be worse:
-Current (doesn't look so good, but more practical):
http://www.comp.ufscar.br/~talvik/kickoff/current1.png
http://www.comp.ufscar.br/~talvik/kickoff/current2.png
-Your suggestion:
http://www.comp.ufscar.br/~talvik/kickoff/possible1.png
http://www.comp.ufscar.br/~talvik/kickoff/possible2.png

> and again here, i wonder if it would look better with Sessions and System in
> separate columns? i suppose that means an even strong bias towards headings in
> their own columns, like in shot 9:
>
I had doubts in this one too. Vertical setup looks better when
vert>horizontal, and vice versa.
I based this rule, on your previous email about easier vertical scanning.
>
> something that occured to me while looking at this is that the right aligned
> headers only really "work" visually if there is a single column. in multi-
> column, i bet they'd look a lot nicer centered (and in single column, they
> probably look nicer right aligned)
>
Agreed
>
> you should be able to just set the width on the item, and have the item itself
> (or, rather, the delegate .. most of that code is in libs/plasma/delegate.*
> these days) handle squeezing it's painting in properly.
Thank you, Plasma
> as for determining the width, QFontMetrics can tell you the width of a
> character, so something like:
>
> QFontMetrics fm(font());
> int maxWidth = fm.width('m') * maxNumberOfCharacters;
You've spared a newbie a lot of time. Thanks

Current set of rules:
-only use the needed number of columns when fits or when doesn't the
max possible
-fill up vertically first
-when doesn't fit, balance number of item in the columns
-if a section doesn't fit in the current column and it fits as whole
in the next columns it is moved
-if a section header is the last item it is moved to the next column
Can you think of ways to improve it?