Breadcrumbs in Kickoff

[Alexey Chernov]

On 20 дек 2011 11:20:23 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 20, 2011 00:33:20 4ernov wrote:
> > unclear why you so against to approve such a work.
> 
> i think it is perfectly fine if you wish to create a modified kickoff and
> ship it as a separate plasmoid. this is what we've done for a few different
> plasmoids, including the tasks plasmoid (and that's ended up turning out
> rather well for everyone i think :).

No, I mean a contribution with config option or something which can return the 
Back button. I don't think it's perfect idea to fork kickoff because of one 
function.

> i do not want plasma desktop to become a collection of everyone's pet
> features with a thousand configuration tweaks.

Exactly. I agree. But as I remember Martin said that we're discussing only 
config option and reverting to Back button wasn't an option. I think, nobody 
also wants Plasma desktop to become a collection of wrong decisions, it's even 
worse.

> the back button was not
> serving everyone well (we got lots of feedback on it ...)

I didn't say the Back button was ideal. I think a serious usability research 
should be performed to find the better solution instead of it. And I can't 
believe any usability expert could suggest breadcrumbs instead of back button 
as it's just against the basic things one could learn in usability.

> and the
> breadcrumbs are more consistent with what we see elsewhere (file dialog,
> dolphin, ..)

That's right. But there're areas (URL string in browser, date and time string 
in clock applications, rich text editors etc.) where breadcrumbs look more 
natural but in spite of it it's not used there. Yes, it will probably make 
something more consistent but will spoil things in many other areas. I don't 
think consistency is the key factor here.

As to me, my solution is: keep both Back button and breadcrumbs. Here's my 
arguments:
- no config and no tweaks required
- users can use both ways
- no redundancy or duplication as it's just two methods to reach the same 
result (there're thousands of examples with such implementations, e.g. same 
features in main menu, toolbar and context menus in one application)
- minimum of code required

I don't mean that it's a bad code or something and I respect all the efforts of 
Martin and whole Plasma team to improve navigation, to find some better 
decisions. But I think such a things should be discussed especially given a 
significant number of critical comments. If something was wrong I don't see any 
problems to solve it.