QuickLaunching : some ideas to improve user experience

[Loïc Marteau]

Hey all !

I was thinking about how to improve user experience about QuickLaunching 
in kde.

As a user I have already fill a bug report about that at the start of 
the year.

Now, thanks to Aaron, we have panel auto-hiding and i ask me if we can't 
just use that to build a dedicated quickLaunch bar.

The idea is to provide what kickoff does, whitout the need to reach 
kickoff and click on it.

We can have a auto hide-panel (on the left or on the right depending of 
what is the easiliest reachable for the user) and put on it :
- favorites apps grouped (should perhaps be a plasmoid itself)
- recently used apps and doc grouped (should perhaps be a plasmoid itself)
- for an equivalent to tab apps we can perhaps add a light old fashion 
kde start menu ?!
- for an equivalent to the leave tab we can add a dedicated popupApplet 
Based Plasmoid  that  show a dialog with all the action the user can do 
(shutdown, leave, hibernate, etc)
- Same thing for the computer tab
- for the search stuff, perhaps the idea is just to put a krunner inside 
a popupapplet
- if the user want quick access to the files in some particular 
directories (download dir for example) he can add perhaps a "folder 
view" plasmoid based on popupApplet too.

For discoverabilty purpose perhaps we need that auto hide panel are 
showed the first seconds than plasma start ?!

Before starting to work on this, i would like to know if you think that 
this could be relevant.

Chears

Lo