netbook reference, the polishing details

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hi all.... (and particulaly Marco :)

we pulled out P's old (first gen!) EEE PC and stuck a USB key with the Plasma 
Netbook Reference Platform build 18 (pnrp18? :) on it. the good news: it 
worked straight out of the box .. er .. usb drive and looks 100x sexier than 
what it shipped with. and i have to say that seeing it on a screen of that 
size makes the whole netbook interface make even more sense than it does when 
viewing it on my laptop. a LOT more, in fact :)

so kudos to everyone involved on this so far (marco for his stewardship, will 
and fregl for getting pnrp moving, the kubuntu folks for getting the tech 
preview and subsequent kubuntu spin out there early on for the first rounds of 
feedback and interest)

my first question, because i'm just that kind of guy, was: how can we improve 
this? given our mantra for 2010 of "fit, finish and polish" and watching P 
work with it the following jumped out at me and i'd like to hear your 
feedback:

* krunner's UI doesn't make sense in a netbook env and it's added weight is 
hard to justify. it should have a way to turn the search UI in it on/off, both 
with a command line switch and a dbus call. we can't simply ditch krunner 
though as it does things like the screen locking and startup notification.

* "add widgets" on SAL is an interesting idea and proves that it can be done 
... but i'm wondering if it _should_ be done. Marco: what's the use case for 
that one? (and sorry if you'd explained it to me before and i've forgotten). 
it seems really clunky while watching P work on it and they seem to really be 
more the point and purpose of the pages

* one of P's first questions when using SAL was "how do add new application?" 
if there wasn't an "Add Widgets" button there, could there be an "Add 
Applications" that launches KPackageKit?

* configuring the pages breaks the look and feel completely because it opens a 
"normal" dialog that fullscreens itself and so we go from pretty pretty 
pictures to the dull grey of a full screen qwidget. perhaps an experiment in 
embedding the dialog into the view (full screen still of course :) and setting 
a background translucency on it might at least improve things?

* alt-tab'ing uses the default box switcher. clicking on the top right corner 
gives us the expose overview of windows (which has an odd/interesting way of 
arranging windows on such a small screen). i think it would make sense to 
harmonize those two modes and have alt-tab also use the expose switching so 
that the experience is more consistent

there are also an interesting assortment of minor annoyances, like how 
gwenview flickers something fierce when using the thumbnail bar to step 
through a full screen slideshow, or how the add widgets dialog sometimes 
appears as a window with window decorations but those are just "garden 
variety" issues and bugs that can be worked through normally. :) at least two 
of the bugs that were visually present in pnrp18 are already fixed in fact. go 
Marco! :)

-- 
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