Thoughts about statusbar

[David Edmundson]

2011/10/25 Aurélien Gâteau <aurelien.gateau at canonical.com>:
> 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.
>

Out of curiosity was it patches that did not get merged, or did you
make a whitepaper on K3B which no-one followed up on?

This seems a bit off-topic but there's no point suggesting to many
apps how they can change their statusbar if it's going to be ignored
by the relevant application developers.

Do you think if it was a more active team on K3B it would have been different?
Was there any resentment to making improvement suggestions? (I stay
clear of making a lot of comments for that reason)
Do you think there there would have been any fallout if you had just
committed changes?

How should you raise awareness of UI issues? Things like your
usability blog post series you made in Feb last year?
They were great (really really great), but unless it feedbacks into
HIG guidelines, anyone who happened to miss PlanetKDE that week will
have never see them.

David Edmundson

>> 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
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