Looking around and thinking ahead

[Eike Hein]

On Thursday 12 December 2013 02:26:42 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> In plasma-shell, we have some construction sites as well. Kickoff still
> feels quite unfinished (some would say broken ;))

I wrote a new menu implementation for KDE 4 recently:

http://i.imgur.com/eiq6D5w.png
http://i.imgur.com/h9Y5jH2.png
http://i.imgur.com/o3s3Bzk.png
http://i.imgur.com/KG2R98u.png

It's fairly simple on the one hand, but decently sophisticated
in some respects on the other (for example, it treats diagonal
pointer moves into subdialogs differently based on their escape
angle, to avoid accidental category switches, and some other
attempts to make user interaction as nice as possible). Key-
board navigation largely matches QMenu, etc.

It's currently based on the Homerun sources framework, which
is conceptually redundant to Plasma Runners, but more con-
venient to use from QML views, as Homerun sources publish
categorized data in the form of Qt models.

This will definitely be ported to Plasma 2 some time in the
first half of 2014. In an ideal world, with enough time to see
what we could do to runners to make Homerun sources obsolete.

QML 2 is also going to make it a bit nicer to use, as the need
to do some things in hotpaths due to bugs in QML 1's ListView
implementation will fall, improving latencies in the UI quite
a bit.

Tester response has been mostly excited and happy so far. De-
spite the 'oldschool' appearance, at least for mouse but also
many touchpad users, the classic cascading popup menu design
simply is a better match to their human ability to point at
things within reasonable distances than the perennially fiddly
"let's have a little smartphone VM in a corner of the screen"
design of Kickoff. Meanwhile, configurable favorites for apps
that are frequently used but not frequently enough to have on
one's panel and support for the search-and-hit-enter usage
patterns mostly succeed in marrying it with the best bits of
Kickoff.

If there's interest, it would be sweet to ponder in what way
or form it might have a place in the mainline shell release.


Cheers,
Eike