taskbar: onlyGroupWhenFull

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Sunday 02 November 2008 00:58:46 Michael Rudolph wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 23:10, Zack Rusin <zack at kde.org> wrote:
> > On Saturday 01 November 2008 13:44:32 Michael Rudolph wrote:
> >> I think, the solution would be to agree on some fundamental concepts
> >> of how a user's desktop (and his mobile phone, his entertainment
> >> system, car, ...) work and then tackle the problems in front of us,
> >> because caring for the usability of taskbar grouping today is like
> >> trying to make it convenient to choose a caliber: to shoot yourself in
> >> the foot.
> >
> > No, that's a terrible analogy. This is not what this discussion was about
>
> You are right. Shooting oneself is terrible; but the analogy was quite
> fitting.
>
> > anyway. We're talking about sensible defaults for the things we /have/.
> > And while we definitely need to look at how to improve the desktop
> > experience
>
> How would that work? It is sure disturbing when I interfere with
> day-to-day development discussions, and I'm sorry if I did, but I'd
> like to know where or when the community starts looking into improving
> the desktop experience. There seems to be quite a reluctance to engage
> in such discussions. So if you, as a rather prominent member of our
> community, could tell me how it's done, I'd be very grateful.

We need to distinguish here what the purpose of the taskbar (or really most of 
the elements in the desktop shell as we present it right now) is. In my 
opinion, we're creating a desktop interface that is easy to learn for 
everybody who has used traditional desktops in the past, but offers some 
feature that don't need learning, but that get you hooked up (in fact you'll 
only notice how well those Plasma elements work once you switch back and miss 
it).

So we're offering a superset of UI experience, kind of what Microsoft does 
with all kinds of protocols and standards (*1) -- extend them and thereby 
blurring the lines of what's traditional. (We were talking about awful 
analogies, no? :-))

So the default taskbar should indeed have those two qualities:

- support workflows the user is used to
- be a noticable best-of-breed implementation

Now the automatic grouping fits into exactly that. It's a rather traditional 
element of a desktop but adds compelling features such as automatic and manual 
grouping (among others) to keep the UX sane, and all that still supporting the 
workflow of users who don't want to learn a new UI.

(*1) But of course not evil, d'oh! We're lovely.
-- 
sebas

 http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org |  GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 489 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/attachments/20081102/a6bb4ede/attachment-0001.sig