the next step on the desktop

[Marco Martin]

On Monday 31 January 2011, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> 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.
> 

perhaps some documents with use cases, personas etc.
that involves workspace and some applications

> > * 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?

this is something worth exploring i think

> > * 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?

and the show dashboard widget could/should go in the panel by default probably

> > * 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?

yup, indeed

> > 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.

but still quite similar, that is the thing that still doesn't completely sound 
to me.

> > > * 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?

drag and drop is good, then a runner action as well.
it would be nice some action/gesture whatever to transform dolphin windows 
into folderviews and back, something that looks organic... hmmm.


> > > 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.

yeah, so this wouldn't duplicate ui for the same feature.
it just has to start very very quickly so ;) (it's still not so fast)

Cheers,
Marco Martin