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List:       kde-pim
Subject:    Re: [Kde-pim] [PATCH] KOrganizer
From:       Reinhold Kainhofer <reinhold () kainhofer ! com>
Date:       2003-08-03 22:22:48
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On Sunday 03 August 2003 19:28, Tobias Koenig wrote:
> the attached patch adds rounded corners to the koagendaitems and a ical
> like frame style.

Is there any particular reason why you want to change the look of korganizer 
again, after the last change by Tim?
Please don't take that personal, but to be honest, I really don't like that 
look. 

Using this style, korganizer looks just too much like an ical-clone too me. 
While I know your preference for Macs, and I'm fine with that, I think KDE 
and KOrganizer are just too good and deserve better than just to try to clone 
other applications and its look. Taking functionality from other applications 
is fine, but we really need to develop our own looks. I think Tim's patch did 
a very good job with that. It didn't look like Outlook or ical, but looked 
very good, and had its own style.

Also if an event starts at 8 am then it starts there, so why should its 
borders be rounded so its start isn't so clear-cut visually any more . To me 
rounded corner more have the look like something that is not allowed to 
actually touch the border.
In contrast, the old cornered boxes really filled the time the event 
allocated, so it looked like that time was absolutely filled, and there is no 
time between two successive events.

These two reasons are just my personal taste, and I know taste is really 
something subjective, so let's switch to reasons based on facts.

> The color calculation doesn't work, the 'dark' color is brighter than
> the 'light' color... Tim could you take a look at it?

Yes, that's certainly a very severe problem. But that can be solved. For more 
severe, see below.

> Any other objections or suggestions?

Yes, take very short events (and don't set the hour too large, otherwise you 
don't see the problem). The really great thing about Tim's patch was that it 
detected short events and in that case didn't print the time span header. 
You, however, just print the header in any case, and allocate at least as 
much space as is needed for the header. 
This has two bad consequences:
- - First, the actual description of short (up to ~1 hour in my hour size) the 
event description won't be printed, and instead the time will be shown (which 
is clear  from the timetable anyway). 
- - And second, zero-time events (Yes, people are really using them. There are 
at least 3 bug reports each with three or four duplicates about that!) and 
very short events allocate at least the space needed for the header. If you 
set the "Hour size in schedule view" to a rather small value, such zero-size 
events will allocate 45 Minutes or more!!! 

Another problem with your rounding of the events is that the radius of the 
rounding is quite different for two identical events, one of which is the 
only event at that time, while the other has other events at the same time 
(so its width is smaller than the width of the first).
In my eyes, all events should have the same radius of the rounded corners, 
otherwise it will probably look quite inconsistent. But then we have a 
problem with very short events, namely that quite a large percentage of the 
area will be lost to the corners.

As an example for all these problem (just from my first quick look) see the 
screenshot at 
http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/Linux/pictures/KOrganizer_ToKoePatch1.png

Look at the blue boxes on monday and the rest of the week. The corners are 
rounded completely different, although both have the same length.

Also, the events on monday noon don't show any header, nor any description. 
That's the worst thing you can do (I walked through korganizer's bug list the 
last few days, and such problems are really serious).

The events on Monday and Thursday evening would have enough space to display 
the description, and the time is not really needed (that's what the boxes are 
for).

And then the event on wednesday evening has zero length, still you allocate 45 
Minutes!

So, in short, I see some serious problems with your proposed patch, both 
subjective (the look) as well as objective problems. 
I'd like it much more if korganizers current look could be kept, and its 
problems could be fixed.


Reinhold
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