Krunner, Kickoff and Nepomuk krunner

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Wednesday 12 November 2008 23:34:29 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Wednesday 12 November 2008, Robert Knight wrote:
> > The current square boxes in KRunner fail as soon as the search result
> > is more than a couple of (short) words
> > long.  eg. "OpenOffice Writer", "OpenOffice Impress" are all clipped.
>
> to quote myself in the first mail from this thread:
>
> "what you're running into is that you can't see all the text that would be
> useful to make a decision on visual scan."

The setup that I find most comfortable in Dolphin (where you get a similar 
situation when you use the filterbar) is shown in the screenshot at
http://vizzzion.org/tmp/krunner-dolphin-itemview.png

For KRunner, this would mean that we do smaller icons, put the text next to it 
and make that text a bit longer than it is right now. The second line of text 
could show subtext, maybe on hover. A bit like we do it in Kickoff. 

Funny enough we just had a similar discussion the other way round -- make 
kickoff use KRunner...

> so .. instead of going around and around agreeing with each other, let's
> brainstorm / mockup concepts that:
>
> a) aren't boring

See below :)

> b) are effective

Well readable, icon still visible enough, more balanced text/icon ratio

> c) show more than three options at a time

I'd guess that such items take 30% more space. Right now, we can show 10 items 
at once, that would go down to 7 (probably even 6 for symmetry). Showing 10 
items at the same time might be a bit too much anyway, 7 seems closer to what 
one usually groks without paying attention to details.

We *could* zoom out a bit showing more items, and/or less text when there are 
more hits. 
Highlighting of the query substring in the items would be though I can imagine 
snazzy effects, and the metaphor 'zooming in on your target' sounds pretty 
strong and appealing to me, even. 

If we highlight the query string in the matches, we could also get rid of the 
input line. A blinking cursor overlay when krunner is opened indicates that 
the user is supposed to just start typing. When you stop typing, the text 
fades out to, say 20% so it's nearly transparant, the icons show the 
highlighted match. I'm not sure how feasible the match highlighting inside the 
items is, some runners that don't simply match substrings, so it's probably a 
bad idea...

> d) don't resort to 22px high line items

That screenshot had 48 px items, I'd say 32px would work as well if we tighten 
it up a bit.

> i'd start it off, but i'm already out of time today. i'll try and work on
> this over the next week though.
-- 
sebas

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