Thoughts about statusbar

[Aurélien Gâteau]

Le 25/10/2011 16:40, Martin Gräßlin a écrit :
> On Tuesday 25 October 2011 14:14:03 Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
>>> And yes this is clearly Workspace and not application related. We as the
>>> workspace define how an application has to look like and how it has to
>>> behave.
>> The statusbar is inside the application window, so I disagree this is a
>> workspace issue.
> My personal opinion is that the Workspace has to define how the windows have
> to behave and it is the task of the Workspace to enforce some consistancy on
> the applications if it has to be. (Compare global menu or Notify OSD at that
> comany in your mail address ;-)

I disagree.

- Regarding global menu, unless you want to do a "global statusbar", 
then this is an application-specific topic.

- Regarding notifications, there is an interest in getting them 
centralized so it is a workspace issue.

> As we see that the application developers fail to improve the UI (exceptions
> are there as usual - e.g. Dolphin, Gwenview or rekonq) we could even go so far
> to say that it is the responsibility of the part of our workspace experience
> which works on having a consistant UI and a clear interaction concept.

The correct fix is rather to raise awareness of UI issues within KDE 
application developers and to discuss these issues with their 
developers. We tried the dictator approach during the last kde-ux 
sprint, redesigning k3b without getting the k3b developers involved. The 
changes did not end up being picked up by k3b developers: we just wasted 
one precious morning of a 3-day sprint.

> In fact with Plasma Active we are already doing a top-down approach on the app
> from the workspace. We just never did on the desktop, because we "trust" the
> application developers to do the best.

I haven't yet seriously used Plasma Active to have an opinion on its 
design (I plan to) but I do not consider Plasma Desktop as the best 
example of well thought-out design. That makes me uncomfortable thinking 
what would come up of the approach you are proposing.

Aurélien

Aurélien