Continued: milou/kickoff/whatever menu

Marco Martin notmart at gmail.com
Thu Apr 17 09:53:16 UTC 2014


Hi all,
I know the discussion was already pretty long :/ but we have to continue it.

To recap the issue, is to not have too many ways to search stuff, to give a 
good unified design direction and to decrease what's called the "gulf of 
execution"
i.e. deciding what's the type of thing i have to search, therefore where i 
have to click in order to search it, this slowes down the process.

(to be clear, I think milou is awsome and my dream would be to have *only* 
that without any start menu nonsense, but we recently seen a certain operating 
system that tried to remove the start menu and we know how well it ended ;)

So, i tried to see how kickoff would look if we try to integrate milou into 
it, the result is in the branch
mart/balookickoff in he repo plasma-desktop, open to testing/feedback/etc 
(even if it doesn't get used in the end, is a good guinea pig)

so here is how it looks:
* the search field is always visible: the magic type to search was considered 
an inconsistency, unless it becomes a common pattern in KDE:
http://wstaw.org/m/2014/04/17/plasma-desktopYr1734.png

* i tried with just stuffing the milou search results in it, indeed looks a 
bit inconsistent:
http://wstaw.org/m/2014/04/17/plasma-desktopif1734.png

* so, let's try to use the kickoff delegates instead:
http://wstaw.org/m/2014/04/17/plasma-desktopQZ1734.png

* but wait, now very few results fit in the window.. let's try to zoom out:
http://wstaw.org/m/2014/04/17/plasma-desktopNl1734.png

so now, the status of master is that it shows small results as in the last 
screenshot, if there are many, if there are few, (less than 10 atm, may become 
more dynamic) it shows bigger delegates as in the second to last result.
besides looking more consistent, it also shows a good feedback to "you 
narrowed the search" , you "zoomed in"

comments? ;)

Cheers,
Marco Martin


More information about the Plasma-devel mailing list