PMC use case

[Christophe Olinger]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 12:31 PM,  <daitheflu at free.fr> wrote:

>
> About the top bar discussion, I would strongly recommend not to do that. A menu (or whatever you call it, for me it's just a menu) has to be the same everywhere.
I do not really agree here. When viewing pictures, I do not neet a
seek slider and when I view videos, I do not need "turn picture"
icons. The playlist is not useful for when I view pictures. There are
some that will be there for all modes, like rating, tagging, the home
button, possibly the skip forward and skip backward buttons and the
"turn on autohiding" button.

> Instead of adding buttons in the top bar, I propose an overlaying menu with autohide capability. This menu would show what mode is currently in use and would allow fast switching / starting. The Mac OS X Dock is a good example of what I'm thinking about.

What is your definiton of menu? The Mac dock is nothing but a panel
with buttons. Sorry if I do not understand you corretly.

You can put it on the bottom/left/top/right side of your desk, make it
autohide and reappear when the mouse pointer comes close to it. You
can launch any app that has an icon in it. For us, we would need a
Music icon, a Video icon, etc... Already running apps icons have an
indicator showing the user that it's already running. We would just
need to add a "Home" icon that would "minimize" all running stuff and
show the Home applet.

Hmmm, I think you actually describe what we are currently doing. we
will have a panel (menu?) with a home button that hides everything
except a home screen. We decided to remove buttons for every mode,
because screen estate is sometimes rare. Instead you have to pass via
the home screen to get to a different mode (maybe with the exception
of when having music in the background while looking at pictures,
where I could imagine a music button on the panel.


> Furthermore, with this idea, a long-click on an icon could make a "submenu" appear with quick access to basic functionnalities like "Quit this mode", "Pause" or anything, without switching to the mode.

Lets first see how many button we really noeed for everymode. Long
clicking them could be an option for special cases, but not really
often used things like pause or quit. I think this could frustrate
users a bit :-)

>
> I might be totally wrong about the thing -never tried PMC and noone pointed me to a doc...- but that's what I'm understanding from the last discussions. So please bash me gently if I'm wrong (and hook me up with doc !) :D

As you said, we are still discussing. there is a doc on the wiki where
we collect things:
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Plasma/Plasma_Media_Center

but nothing is final. So keep on coming with the ideas and make sure
to test PMC. Currently everything is on PMC. I will give out a git
server as soon as the current developers agree on where to do this
thing (probably gitsvn?? )

>
> Also, I've several Google Wave invitations. This can be really useful to collaborate. It provides files sharing, powerful editing and even polls or white board through extensions. Just tell me if you're interested in using such a tool.

Hmm, I never used that. I really like irc. Maybe I am oldfashioned but
currently I have almost already a communication possibilities
overdose.


Anyway, greetings to Strasbourg an thank you for discussing with us.

>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> François
>
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