Introducing Homerun

[Marco Martin]

On Tuesday 13 November 2012, Alex Fiestas wrote:
> Most users regularly use less than a dozen applications, and same idea can
> probably be applied to activities I think (it is ok to keep an activity I
> created 9month ago for a travel I did to Rome, it is not ok to have it in
> the interface every time I want to change activity).
> 
> In another topic, something I specially like from homerun is its "Show all
> apps" view:
> http://wstaw.org/m/2012/11/13/plasma-desktopb11622.png

well, the first thing that comes to my mind looking at that is... where is 
waldo? :p

why? several reasons, not all of them solvable:
* question of quantity: when more than a given number of items is shown at the 
same time, as already explained the brain goes in linear scan mode

* everything is at the same importance: there are tons of entries, some may be 
very important (browser, calligra..) and some rarely needed, if ever (amor... 
srsly? :P)

* icons are not designed to be presented in huge quantity: explicit guideline 
of oxygen: application icons don't have much common style that recreases the 
visual noise when shown in a grid (as opposed to for instance mimetypes)

This suggests there are two separate problems:
1) we have a ton of stuff right now that gets listed as applications that 
probably shouldn't even be there or, we should at least have a way to tell 
apart core applications from "small littering stuff"

2) a view that lists stuff should always try to show not much stuff at once, 
maybe be resizable, but be small (in resulting centimiters on screen, not 
pixels) by default for the two reasons of distance travelled by mouse and 
being able to get the whole list as a single glance

> It made me realize that right now with kickoff we are adding a huge
> complexity to find (with the mouse) what you are looking for because you
> not only have to remember the icon or the name, but you also have to
> remember the category. 

yep, hate representations in trees ;)
i'm usually for a single level more "tagging" approach, but by default we 
should try to produce lists fairly small

Cheers,
Marco Martin