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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: KControl!
From:       Frans Englich <frans.englich () telia ! com>
Date:       2004-02-27 0:08:04
Message-ID: 200402262230.07059.frans.englich () telia ! com
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On Tuesday 24 February 2004 13:15, Benoit Walter wrote:
> It is alway good to have new ideas. What I particularly like about your
> design is that it uses big icons (which is very good for usability) and
> displays all categories and the contents of the selected one in the same
> window, which makes the navigation really easy.
>
> The disavantages, you already gave some of them:
> - MDI: many users have difficulties when they have to handle several
> top-levels windows
> - Not task oriented

Could you elaborate? I would like to hear more on that. For example, in what 
way is it not task oriented? How is kcontrol3 task oriented? And of course, 
how could my idea be made task oriented?

> - Too futuristic design (reminds me of K-Jofol :-)
> - Unusual, non-standard interface

That is of course all true. This idea is "mad science" and it is on deep water 
- it basically mean inventing a new widget(which must be a success) as well 
as the new design must be so good it is worth breaking consistency. I think 
that this idea(when implemented) either is a big failure or a big success. We 
need a prototype and some -->real<-- usability testing before we can judge 
this. 

> - Search is not integrated (although it would be possible)

Yeah, do you have any ideas how it could be added? (I need more ideas than my 
own :)

>
> >From a developement point of view, I guess it is feasible, although it
> > would
>
> require a lot of work.

Yeah. I really wonder if it's that much work but if the idea not get turned 
down somehow I will try to implement it some time, for KDE4. Afterall, it 
would be cool if it turned out good and the programming part would be 
fun(probably :).

>
> But because of the unusual interface, I don't think it would be sensible to
> bring this idea to users. 

You could be right, but considering my small understanding of what this idea 
practically means I will wait with judging until an implementation is here to 
take for a test drive.

> It could however be used as an alternative for 
> kcontrol (besides the tree view and icon view) and not activated by
> default? Another idea is to make kcontrol plug-in based... 

Feature bloat I would say. I think we should settle for one design, I find it 
hard motivating having several navigation concepts.

(OMG folks, kde-usability have exploaded during the last two days - over 100 
mails :) Now, if those were patches instead...)

Cheers,

		Frans

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