Previews - another new thread

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

On Tue, 02 Feb 2016 20:10:43 +0100
meik michalke <meik.michalke at uni-duesseldorf.de> wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 2. Februar 2016, 14:10:10 schrieb Thomas Friedrichsmeier:
> > - Move the previews to the left side of the dialog. Not bad, IMO,
> >   although I do think it is slightly confusing, particularly when
> > any preview (code or other preview) is active by default.
> 
> yes, that's true. i *really* like that place for plots, but the code
> preview will most definitely always look too narrow, as will a lot of
> result previews, i presume. as soon as you activate two previews
> (like plot and code) it starts to look way too squeezed. all that is
> text is probably better off at the old place, below the dialog. if
> it's not too hard to have two areas for previews...
> 
> the default width for plots should be the current height if the
> dialog, so plots are a square.

Does not fix everything, but: The preview pane will remember its width,
implicitly, i.e. resize it once, and the next dialog will use that
size, too. (Admittedly, the initial default is currently useless.)

For as much as I have played with it so far, that seemed to play out
rather nicely, too, i.e. the width I had chosen for a data preview did
not seem too far off for a plot preview, or - for that matter - the
code preview.
 
> > - Make plot previews docked by default. Try any plot plugin.
> 
> like i said, i really like it, including the menu for exports etc.
> 
> how do you feel about this?
>  http://codepen.io/anon/pen/yeqRvP

Your mockup seems to make two(?) key suggestions:
1) Code preview back at the bottom. Technically possible, but slightly
more work. I admit I'm a bit skeptical, because:
- Code preview will then change its width depending on whether a second
  preview is active at the same time. In your mockup it looks like the
  code preview will have ample room, but once the plot preview is gone,
  it would actually be somewhat squeezed, again. With no other preview
  active, that's pretty much the situation we have, now, and most
  dialogs are actually "too narrow" for a useful code preview, today.
- The code preview will again be competing for height instead of width.
  Now that I've tried it, I find that on my monitor(s), there is
  actually a vast amount of screen estate horizontally, but not
  vertically. I find that I can actually expand the preview to very
  comfortable width, without problem. (16:9 has not yet conquered every
  single desktop, of course).
- The horizontal layout implies that I can configure the width of the
  (code) preview to my liking (while the height depends on the size of
  the dialog), instead of the just the height. I find that rather
  useful.
2) Move the buttons to the top. I'll admit, I don't fully understand
why? I did think a bit about moving buttons to the bottom (well,
assuming no preview area, there). One thing that stopped me was that I
had no good idea what to do about the "Auto close"-box, then.

Regards
Thomas
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/rkward-devel/attachments/20160202/3e4e1ba8/attachment-0001.sig>