the next step on the desktop

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday, January 31, 2011, Marco Martin wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 2:22 AM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:

> > it is time to go to that next step and move people away from the old
> > ways.
> 
> yep, I would still like to push desktop beyond the desktop, resistence
> against is so amazing that i find it harder and harder.
> we need a concentrated effort between all areas for this i think, not
> just plasma ;)

ok, so lets put together a roadmap and pitch it to the entire KDE devel 
community and generate some consensus.
 
> > let's try something big and new. let's make that Big Move and step away
> > from ~/Desktop.
> 
> to me the biggest dumb thing is ~/Desktop itself, not much having
> icons on desktop (in the form of folderview applets)
> having n folderviews topic-specific goes very well with the concept of
> activities.
> the biggest hurdle is always the fact of having them in a
> background-ish desktop.

agreed; i do also like the idea of having SAL features right there, though. 
it's such a compelling use of widgets-on-the-desktop and looks really pretty 
as a bonus.
 
> > my proposal is this:
> > 
> > * by default, Search and Launch on the desktop
> 
> There are several issues with s&l:
> * it's not really done for big screens,

true

> there is a sad line of icons sitting in the middle of the desktop

it actually looks pretty good on large screens. i was surprised by how good, 
in fact.

> * it's not really done for containing applets, would almost mean
> dropping desktop widgets:
>   - right now it contains widgets in a little panel like strip with
> horizontal form factor. now overly pretty.
>   - making it contain free layout applets like the desktop would look
> quite dirty since applets would cover the launcher icons randomly

hm, yes, good points. perhaps we could do some sort of melding of what the 
newspaper containment does? a search area at the top, with results filling in 
below it, and a scrollable grid for widgets below that?

> * being always mostly covered by windows limits the usefulness, as i
> said great in dashboard (this is quite true for widgets as well, but
> being smaller the problem is less strong)

there are a few things we could do to "fix" this... e.g. when you click in the 
search edit we could trigger it forward as a dashboard, and we could advertise 
the keyboar shortcut for pulling it forward in the click message text of the 
search edit?

> * it empasizes the concept of starting apps, (or "start menu" if you
> want) a lot, that's really something i would like to get away with
 
it has / could have more uses than just that, though. a google-on-your-desktop 
.. 

if we use our imaginations a bit, i bet we could come up with all sorts of 
useful things. e.g. with the widgets runner, it could be used to add widgets 
to the desktop in response to queries: "cpu temp<enter>" and there i have a 
cpu temp monitor on my desktop. there must be dozens of such ideas?

> what about having it (or something similar) that appears as a big
> sidebar of the screen when clicking on the K icon?

well, that'd be krunner or lancelot or raptor :) different concepts imo.
 
> > * an icon in this S&L that takes you to your desktop folder .. in a file
> > manager.
> 
> could be, i would still rather find a way to encoourage use of
> folderview as activity relevant file containers tough

i'm trying to imagine a clever way to make it easy to go from a folder 
returned as a search result to a folderview on the desktop. it could be 
offered as an action on the QueryMatch, for instance, and make it easy to 
"pin" that folder to your current activity layout instead of going through the 
widget explorer?
 
> > * a new panel layout (TBD: let's work on this together!)
> 
> a long due thing is moving app systray items in the taskbar and even
> hiding all xembed icons by default (but, a voluntary is needed to have
> this done)

+1
 
> > * an "activities" widget (i'll hapilly write it) that sits next to the
> > app launcher and when clicked brings up the actvities manager
> 
> there is one on kde-look. however i remeber that you had a valid
> argument against it: it would slowly become basically a replica of the
> activity manager with most-but-not-all of its features.

indeed; i was simply envisioning a button that would launch the full activity 
manager UI. right now it is very hidden.

-- 
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
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