Review Request: Add simple Type-and-Select feature to Folderview applet

[Celeste Lyn Paul]

> On 2010-01-21 23:18:16, Fredrik Höglund wrote:
> > The code looks good, but I'm slightly concerned about the usability aspect in that this works
> > differently from type and search in Dolphin. There's also no visual feedback when the search
> > is reset.
> > 
> > I think it would be a good idea to get some input on this from our usability experts.
> 
> Shantanu Tushar Jha wrote:
>     I think you're talking about the cycling which occurs on repeated presses of the same key.I did some experiments on Dolphin and found that if we have dirs 'pizza' 'pppinfo' 'press' then pressing 'ppp' selects 'press' (due to the cycling) instead of 'pppinfo'. This is quite ambiguous too because it depends on what the user meant. In my case, I meant it to be pppinfo.
>     But as you said, folderview shouldn't differ from dolphin, or we'll have inconsistency. So we can-
>     1. Make the folderview behave in the same way as Dolphin.
>     or,
>     2. See if someone has a better solution? (usability)
>     
>     Will make changes according to further comments :)

Typing the filename is less simple but has greater utility than simply navigating by the first character, which isn't useful in a large directory. It also provides greater accessibility benefit, which should be one of the top goals in addition to the feature/bug request. While it might be more difficult to learn (just slightly -- as in maybe try it 3-5 times and get it instead of getting it the 1 or 2 time), I don't think it is impossible. Also, most of the users who will use this feature also use this feature in dolphin, and so will attempt to use their previous knowledge of the feature and try it the Dolphin-way in folderview.

Conclusion: Option 1. Make folderview behave the same way as dolphin. (I also assume this includes the KFile dialogs as well?)

If, in the future a better solution is designed, then both folderview and dolphin would change since we want them to share the behavior.


- Celeste Lyn


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On 2010-02-25 03:51:15, Shantanu Tushar Jha wrote:
> 
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> This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
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> 
> (Updated 2010-02-25 03:51:15)
> 
> 
> Review request for Plasma, usability, Fredrik Höglund, and Celeste Lyn Paul.
> 
> 
> Summary
> -------
> 
> This patch intends to provide a simple selection method to select icons. Its intended to be able to select a file plasma-desktop.desktop by just typing initial characters, "plas" for example.
> Comments on the hard-coded 2000ms welcome. If the user doesn't press any key within 2000ms after the last key press, the match string clears.
> 
> 
> This addresses bug 187241.
>     https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=187241
> 
> 
> Diffs
> -----
> 
>   trunk/KDE/kdebase/apps/plasma/applets/folderview/iconview.h 1078728 
>   trunk/KDE/kdebase/apps/plasma/applets/folderview/iconview.cpp 1078728 
> 
> Diff: http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/2659/diff
> 
> 
> Testing
> -------
> 
> Works with the latest trunk.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Shantanu
> 
>