zui ideas

[Marco Martin]

On 7/10/09, Chani <chanika at gmail.com> wrote:
> on sunday me, notmart and ruphy came up with some crazy ideas for the ZUI.
> here are the notes... better late than never ;)
>
> zoom 2 (fully zoomed out):
>
> -the containment is too small to realyl interact with, so put the toolbox
> over
> top.
> problem: on small devices the toolbox could be bigger than the containment.
as a startwe can maybe enable/disable the text as needed, or relayout
the icons in a line or in a grid, depending from the containment
size...
>
> -if you have one screen there's always space for 4x4 containments, so when
> containment-saving is implemented we could have 2 columns of active ones and
> 2
> columns of saved ones. you could drag&drop between the areas to load and
> save
> them (although we could have load/save buttons too perhaps).
> for multiple screens, we get around the problem of different-sized screens
> by
> giving each screen its own part of the canvas for its own containments. we
> might need to record the last screen they were on, for this. when a screen
> is
> unplugged, all its containments would be saved out, and show up in the
> saved-
> containment list on either the first screen or all screens. when it's
> plugged
> in again they'd all jump back where they were automagically. to move a
> containment from one screen to another, just drag it there.

or we could have all containments big as the biggest ones, with just
some margin around the ones with smaller screen resolution, hmm,
doesn't look really pretty...

> problems:
> -discoverability. some people try to drag things, some don't.
sigh, /me really wishes we could rely on drag and drop more, people
seems really have issue with that (what is really fun is that macs are
considered soo easy and rely on drag and drop for a bunch of stuff,
but let's back on topic :p)
> -accessibility. you can't drag with the keyboard.
>
> zoom level 1:
> -can we overlay the cashew bar on containments instead of putting it below?
> also... bigger buttons are easier to click, but get in the way of applet
> dragging. so should we make them bigger or not?
>
> zoom 1/2:
> -we should have a big + button where the next new ctmt would go. I've wanted
> that since the start but never got around to it.
we can draw it on the view or having a widget positioned in the usual
position containment code...

> -corona toolbox: try using a hbox and see if it looks better.
wonder if it can have problems for crappy screen resolutions, but
definitely it should try harder to not overlap containments

> -making the remove action work for the current activity should be easy now,
> but we haven't got around to it
>
> zoom 0 (fully zoomed in):
> -the cashew can be moved around the edge of the screen; should we make it
> possible to detach it?
> but you'd have to rewrite the toolbox first because the code is scaaary

yeah, making it a qgraphicswidget would make the thing a bit less gross :)

> ...the only thing we're missing here is someone to actually implement all
> this
> ;)
>
> --------------
>
> today we talked to sebas and he had some other zui ideas. I don't seem to
> have
> proper notes on those. it was something to do with dynamically zooming out
> as
> much as needed to show all the containments. also, positioning htem nicely
> so
> that you didn't have to pan slightly to see the edges of them (also, having
> hte topleft one pinned to the topleft corner of the screen sucks)
>
> oh, and either painting a screenshot of the active containment, or just its
> wallpaper, instead of the checkerboard. we want this to be shiny as well as
> useful. :)

yeah, iirc was about putting the current containment as background of
the zoom out corona, probably just an image since a transparent zoomed
out view on top of another view would be sooo fast :p
then putting more margins, making the first containment not 0,0 but
something more, in proportion with the margin, can't remember more at
the moment

uh, i maybe would also highlight somehow the currently active
containment (shadows under all of them versus a glow?)

> sebas, maybe you can explain your ideas a bit more clearly than I can. :)
>
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