Thoughts about statusbar

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday, October 11, 2011 15:10:42 Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> On Tuesday 11 October 2011 12:54:23 todd rme wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 12:16 PM, Alex Fiestas <afiestas at kde.org> wrote:
> > > Taking a look at some apps, I've noticed that most of them have an
> > > almost
> > > unused statusbar (or totally not used in some cases) resulting in a big
> > > empty grey space.
> > > 
> > > In the same way that bit a bit we're fixing the KStatusNotifeir behavior
> > > in
> > > our apps, should we fix the status bar by removing it and placing
> > > somewhere
> > > else the content (if they are really needed?)
> > > 
> > > The easier thing though, and the very least we should do is hide it by
> > > default as some apps do.
> > > 
> > > What do you think? is statusbar (as badly used right now) needed?
> > 
> > What about the way rekonq does it?  It just displays the information
> > needed when it is needed in a box in the lower-right of the window.
> > This could do with some better theming perhaps, but otherwise for
> > these situations it seems to make sense.
> 
> The rekonq one is quite good as it is context sensitive, but with my KWin
> dev hat on I could cry when I see how they did it.

yes, well, that's because they chose a silly way of doing it :) it should just 
be an in-window widget, not a top-level window.

> For rekonq it would be
> much better to just show the link as a tooltip as that would be the most
> context sensitive way. Why do I have to understand that the link is shown
> on the down left corner of the window? Yes Firefox does it the same way.

the reason is imho simple:

* a tooltip obscures the text you are most likely looking at right now
* the bottom left keeps it in a well known location so only when i care to see 
the link location i can glance exactly there and get it instantly

it works well imho, just that the rekonq implementation chose a suboptimal way 
of accomplishing it :)

> For most applications I think just removing it is the right approach. E.g.

agreed

> if network is not working in kopete it is way better to have a proper in
> app warning than a small text in the statusbar saying "no network".
> 
> The real issue is probably that this is an per-application change. So we
> would have to define a project to go through all applications, extract the
> useful messages, put them into in-app warnings and remove the statusbar.

yes; as well as sometimes just saying "that information is not worth it". the 
kmail example is a great one. i do not care what column and line i am on and 
spell checking should be shown in the toolbar if at all.

-- 
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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