KDE's Plasma: How not to do lists...

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hi Reinhold.

just read your blog on planet.kde.org, and i have to say that perhaps the 
least useful way of reporting bugs is by blog. full stop. that you decided to 
spend your first blog entry in over 2 years doing that is pretty sad.

if you come and talk to those of us working on these things, we could help you 
out with some useful information. as it stands, your blog entry is full 
information that is either wrong or missing background information that would 
help explain things a bit more.

it would have been no more difficult to contact us with your questions than it 
was to write that blog entry. we have a mailing list: plasma-devel at kde.org. 
the same text you wrote in your blog entry could have found its way there 
first/instead.

i could understand if you'd asked and nobody had replied or we'd given you 
some unuseful reply. but you didn't bother to do that. 

instead of seeking out information from the people working on it, you instead 
spread your thoughts around to everyone who reads planet.kde.org and thereby 
driven down the total quality of knowledge available amongst the readership in 
general. that's unfortunate. 

to say that i'm disappointed by that is an understatement. as one kde 
developer to another i ask that in future you pay us the common courtesy of 
asking us about these issues before representing us, potentially with 
inaccuracy and harm, to the world abroad.

to answer your concerns with the strip widget for Add Widgets:

* that the icon names aren't fully shown is a bug, plain and simple. the 
person who wrote that widget left it in an unfinished state. i've since been 
fixing things as i have time to do so and there were rather more unfortunate 
issues than that one. it will get fixed, however, and has precisely zero to do 
with actual design as it's an implementation flaw.

* you assert that there is a horizontal hierarchy. you are wrong, despite the 
use of three exclamation points. the tab bar at the top is actually a list of 
tags to filter by (consider "running" to see that point clearlyer). and for 
comparison: there was no hierarchy in the old dialog, either. so why a 
horizontal row of buttons then? because there is currently a bug in Qt that 
locks up the entire application solid when we use what would likely be a lot 
more sensible: a popup. when that bug gets fixed (or we come up with a better 
representation for the tags) then that strip will go away and be replaced with 
something rather more sane.

* generic icons in the list: this was always a problem, and for things like 
the clocks they really ought to have little screenshots of the applet instead 
of generic icons. again, more work for someone to dive into.

finally, i'd invite you to consider all the use cases for this listing: on the 
screensaver, on the dashboard, in plasma-netbook, for placing widgets on the 
desktop, for placing widgets on a panel in plasma-desktop. it becomes rapidly 
apparent during usage of the interface across these use cases that the old 
dialog with a vertical listing was really not great.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks