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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Idea for KDE 4 - global, smooth zoom feature.
From:       Fred Schaettgen <Sch () ttgen ! net>
Date:       2005-05-26 23:08:16
Message-ID: 200505270108.17355.Sch () ttgen ! net
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On Thursday, 26. May 2005 20:58, Diego Moya (a.k.a. TuringTest) wrote:
...
> Could we start replacing the K-menu with a K-ZUI? ;-)

Sure, we can try :)
To be honest, I had a hard time trying to map your discussion about a ZUI to 
the real world. I don't understand what so great about seeing a minimized 
version of a document instead of just an abstraction.
In a pdf reader like kpdf or acrobat reader - do you prefer the thumbnail 
preview or the TOC?
If all the item in my taskbar would be just small thumbnail, then how am I 
supposed to see the difference between all the different terminals?
So there is way without a big headline, which is readable when zoomed out a 
bit more, agreed? 
Now we have 100 items, let's say A4 pages, all with a big title next to it. We 
zoom out. What do we see then? 100 titles and a grayish blur below which does 
nothing more than occupy screen space. If we don't display the thumbnail at 
all once they are too small to be useful, we still have the problem that the 
aspect ratio of the title is likely to be very different from the A4 papers 
they are representing. How can we be screen space efficient while maintaining 
the relative locations of all items on our inifinte plane at the same time?

Or what happens if new pages are inserted? In general, I don't understand how 
the layout management would look like in such a ZUI when new documents come 
and go, grow and shrink.

But let's concentrate on the example you mentioned, the K-Menu. What do you 
think it could look like, especially the application section together with 
the recently used-section?
How would you do the layout of the nested containers (application groups)? 
What do you do if a previously small container grows much bigger than its 
neighbours? I see no way to keep the layout space efficient, while adding 
more an more applications to a group, if we don't want to rearrange 
everything at some point. If we rearrange, we break the spatial 
relationships, which we care so much about. With popup menus we don't have 
this problem btw.

Fred

-- 
Fred Schaettgen
Sch@ttgen.net
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