GSoC 2016 Project Idea Usability Suggestions

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On December 24, 2015 1:49:42 PM GMT+01:00, Arnav Dhamija <arnav.dhamija at gmail.com> wrote:
>Hi everyone
>
>I am a first year computer science undergraduate at the university and
>I 
>have a project idea I want to implement in the Dolphin file manager. 
>Response from the Dolphin team has been positive and they have
>suggested 
>bringing the issue towards the usability side to create an easy to use 
>GUI to make this happen. My idea is as follows:
>
>*Trays Panel Extension for the Dolphin File Manager for improving GUI 
>file selection operations**
>*
>Selecting multiple files in any file manager for copying and pasting
>has 
>never been a pleasant experience, especially if the files are in a 
>non-continuous order. Often, when copying files between devices we
>might 
>find that we need to select only a subset of the required files we have
>
>selected and this leads to the unwieldy operation of removing files
>from 
>our selection. Of course, the common workaround is to create a new 
>folder and to put all the items in  but this is a very inefficient 
>process and can be very slow if large files need to be copied between 
>devices.
>
>My solution to this problem is to add a panel/view in Dolphin where the
>
>links to files and folders can be temporarily saved for a session. The 
>files and folders are "staged" on this panel. Hence, the user can add 
>folders and files from several different directories to this panel and 
>can then collectively perform actions on all the items in the tray such
>
>as copy, paste, cut, upload images in selection to Facebook, upload 
>files to Dropbox, etc. This makes complex file operations easy by 
>staging the operation before performing it.
>
>Files can be added to this tray by using a right-click context menu 
>option or by using the mouse scroll click or drag and drop. As an 
>additional option, the session for the File Tray Panel can be saved for
>
>later use.
>
>My initial idea was to have another *split view *mode with its button
>in 
>the toolbar in Dolphin. It will function similarly to the existing
>split 
>view but with one half of the screen dedicated to the "Files tray".
>This 
>would make it neatly integrated with Dolphin's existing toolset and it 
>would make dragging and dropping easy. Dolphin maintainer Emmanuel 
>Pescosta suggested using Plasmoids to make the project more cohesive 
>with KDE and to make it usable with multiple applications (eg
>Gwenview).
>
>I would be much obliged to hear feedback from the usability and visual 
>design team on this and suggestions for a cleaner UI. Thanks!
>
>-- 
>arnav dhamija
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>Visual-design mailing list
>Visual-design at kde.org
>https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/visual-design

Hi Arnav,
This sounds like a very interesting idea!
I won't go too much into interaction design details right now as I think those would better be explored over the course of GSoC.
As for the dolphin panel vs. Plasmoid decision: Actually I'd like to see both: A plasmoid would, as Emmanuel said, have clear benefits beyond Dolphin.
Within Dolphin itself, however, an integrated panel in the main GUI would be better. Therefore I it would be great to have both, the content of which would be synchronized.
The developers have to tell you whether doing both would be beyond the scope of GSoC or not. If you can do only one of them at first, is say you can decide which one to start with.
In general is say thumbs up for exploring this idea!
Best,
Thomas
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/visual-design/attachments/20151226/cbacb49e/attachment.html>