Reviewing Plasma themes

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On April 12, 2010, Aleksey Alekseyev wrote:
> > backtraces?
> 
> Plasma mostly just silently restarted. Also I am not sure if I had
> debug information at the moment (I do have it now though)

that's probably why you didn't get backtraces (no debug info). with it 
installed now, you should be able to get backtraces. and i bet most of them 
were KPixmapCache ones if they happened during / shortly after theme changes.

> The primary problem with categories is there are quite a lot of them,
> and presenting a very long list in a horizontal "strip" is bad,
> because you have to scroll a lot

vertical was even worse.

> and you can't scan it at a glance. Having so

what is lost in the horizontal strip is a clear "reading line" that the 
vertical one had (left aligned margin), but that can be regained.

> many categories and making it hard to explore and navigate the list of
> them defeats their purpose

the old one had the exact same issue. but we could use a popup menu there for 
them. right now, due to bugs in Qt, we can't do that with the new widget 
(horizontal or vertical). as soon as we can, i'll be dropping the tab widget 
for the categories.
 
> need at the moment. Exploring the widgets is inconvenient, because you
> have to mouse-over every one of them to read what they are doing.

that's a combination of bad naming in some cases and the icons not showing the 
full names (they get cut off currently, which isn't good) in other cases.

> services" category, its icon didn't catch my eye 

i'd love to see the icons become little screenshots of the widgets. that 
requires someone who is somewhat committed to actually ensuring they get done 
and updated over time. the artists already have enough on their plate as it 
is, and nice clear little snapshots are something nearly anyone could do. 
would you be interested in trying to come up with a nice collection of such 
things?

> and scanning widgets
> by their names is not possible with current layout.

it was hardly easier in the old one given how many could be shown at once; the 
horizontal scrolling does need some work, though, i think.

besides what can be improved, there's also a lot of habituation to overcome.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
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KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks