Continued: milou/kickoff/whatever menu

[Vishesh Handa]

On Thursday, April 17, 2014 11:53:16 AM Marco Martin wrote:
> 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"

Sure. If that is actually the issue. I honestly don't see anything wrong with 
having multiple places to search. Also, if you really want to go down this 
track then one could argue for mapping Alt + F2 to Kickoff instead of krunner.

> 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 ;)
> 

We clearly need to address both search and browsing of applications.

Though I don't think the lesson from windows should be that "start menus are 
always required". The lesson could be that different UIs are better suited for 
different tasks. We in KDE are doing a good job of keeping that in mind.

> 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
> 

Maybe you want to try it out with Baloo for KF5 installed? That way you'll get 
more search results - http://wstaw.org/w/2DTN/

> * 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? ;)

It's doesn't look bad, but it is inconsistent.

How about we take a step back and re-evaluate all of this after this initial 
release? We had discussed on the sprint how we would re-evaluate the default 
launcher (homerun-kicker vs normal kicker). We can also talk about how we want 
to best integrate the search experience in Plasma.

-- 
Vishesh Handa