changing the icon names will be one of those annoying tasks, but there it is. i just wish we'd done a naming spec 10 years ago so we wouldn't be dealing with this crap today. oh well.
if you'd like to help with the kdelibs porting, find me on irc and i'll give you some pointers. it's pretty easy stuff, essentially grepping for KIcon, loadIcon, SmallIcon, etc. and changing the text in there to the proper names as recorded in the spreadsheet.
someone asked for a screenshot of krunner and someone else asked what happens if they had a control panel named the same as a command on disk. well, they say a picture is worth a thousand words:
in the above shot, were one to press enter then the first item in the list would "execute" (whatever that means for the given runner). it's all qaction based, so really anything could happen including nothing if it's purely informational.
gael added a list widget as you can see so we can actually see results returned. it will be replaced with something a bit more bling and useful, but i'm waiting on some art direction for that.
a new background that fits with oxygen is also on its way. =)
there's another half dozen or so todo's with krunner that relate to design issues that i'm going to try and kill over the next week or two and then i'll probably hand it over to a couple of the people who have been working on it lately to flesh out and, if they are up to it, maintain.
6 comments:
I'd say it's better to start actions with an action word. So:
Execute /usr/bin/mouse
or
Start program /usr/bin/mouse
and
Search blah
Making a distinction between a command and an application is a bit strange too. They can be the same thing. Otherwise you could type oowriter and it would show up as a command, but then type Writer and it shows up as an application even though they're the same.
You can get rid of the need to specify that something is the default by just selecting the default in the list (or highlighting it in some way) as shown here: http://mushroomstamp.ca/krunner1.png
those actually aren't action words, they are the name of the runner and it's mostly there for debugging at the moment.
"Search /home/aseigo/foo.txt" doesn't make much sense anyways; perhaps "Open /home/aseigo/foo.txt". in any case actions will be added to the interface later.. so you'll see the item and then be able to select from actions.
the list is going away completely, so i haven't spent any time really making it very usable (e.g. showing which is the default item with clarity). i really don't like the list, it was just a very easy way to show things right now.
It'll be difficult to get away from a list for displaying a list of possible matches ;)
I'm interested to see what you'll come up with though.
I think that it would be better to put the second item information not between brackets but with a diferent color like gray or a diferent font size or style. In this way I think that it visually it's more easy to distinguish the two items and their role.
Another example, which is not related to krunner, it is on the kmenu where it shows the name of the application and their description betwen brackets, where also I think that it should be better that the description would appear in greay.
(Also since KDE 3.5.5 or earlier in the Kmenu there aren't brackets to separe the application name from it's description which I think it's worse because it makes the application a lot larger and more diffcult to remember, I know that I can disable the application description but I think that it provides a valuable information for a non Linux user).
But also that it's a more general problem in KDE, where too many items share the same font style, which make it's interface a bit more plain and boring, for example, in the menu and in the toolbar icon descriptions, the kmenu and many more dialogs.
Using diferent font styles or colors it helps to distinguish the importance of the messages, and to organize into a hierarchy, for example if for a description items or contextual information KDE use a font color or style, people could recognize better and quicker what kind of message it is, which makes the general interface feeling more consistent and it give more usability.
Sorry if my english isn't easy to understand.
Josep
I think having different font sizes and colors and all that would be very, very bad.
It's not Mario Party you're looking at, it's a dialog that should be functional and professional looking.
A better way would be to make the 'active' item display in black (or whatever the current theme color is for normal characters on the screen), and the other items in gray (or whatever the theme color is for insensitive/inactive items).
I'm not willing to have a lot of differents fonts sizes and colors, only if you want a subtile diference that let to make a better distintion of a different kind of messages.
Josep
Post a Comment