Friday, May 9, 2008

KNewStuff with Goya

KHotNewstuff2 is going to be using Goya (once it moves out of kdereview and into kdeui on the 19th). So I thought publicly thank Raphael(ereslibre) and Kevin(ervin) for the great work on such a nice framework. I also wanted to let everyone see the new ui a bit and get some feedback.



This is 'khotnewstuff4 plasma-themes.knsrc' Currently the name, one line of description, author, and downloads are visible. I'll try to get rating shown, and a way to see more information about an entry. Also, notice the tooltip shows the complete description for each entry, it can be a bit big at times, not sure what the best way to show that would be, suggestions anyone?

13 comments:

Linus said...

Is that the default look for the tooltip? It seem a bit 90-ish. The other stuff looks great!

reldruH said...

That looks wonderful. KNewStuff is one of my favorite parts of KDE4 and it always gets a big reaction from everybody I show it to. Out of curiosity, what is 'collaborate?'

Tux said...

I believe something like the drop-down details kubuntu's adept manager would look good in KNewStuff

blorg said...

I think there are too many buttons.. is the "collaboration" button really necessary for every item? maybe that menu could be accessed by right click on the item itself

Sami Kyöstilä said...

Is there any way of making the screenshots bigger? I find it difficult to discern any meaningful details from the tiny images shown above.

Unknown said...

How about if selecting an item makes the description expand?

Enrico Ros said...

The improvement is big here! Compliments ;-)
If you want other suggestions:
- you can try to differentiate more the body of the item (so having 'title', 'details', 'download counts' with different font size or weight or style may help here)
- you can try making buttons frames appear only on hover, thus giving a more flat appearance but preserving the full functionality when hovering.

I can't wait till the 19th ;-)

Hans said...

The problem with this dialog among others in KDE4 is that it looks too cluttered. The main reason is all the buttons. There was a huge discussion about this in Rafael's blog if I remember correctly, but it was a long time ago so I've forgot the content.

Anyway, I would like to hide all the buttons unless you click on an entry (think Firefox or Adept Manager). This have an obvious disadvantage (it's troublesome to install/uninstall multiple items, themes in this example) but it makes the dialog much more appealing to the eye and is, in my opinion, less confusing.

Here are two solutions I've thought of:

1. Show the buttons on hover. I don't know about this one, but something inside me screams "This is bad. Baaad!". Hm.

2. Have checkboxes to the left, similar to those email GUIs we're used to. With checkboxes, it doesn't feel as cluttered (see iTunes), but then you'll need extra buttons somewhere for the actions and make it intuitive.*

There are some small details**, but overall it looks really, really promising. Is this really using Goya? I didn't know it has progressed this much.

KNewStuff was one of the things I wanted to see improved in the 4 series, thank you all for making my dream come true! :)

---
* This would lead to other possibilities, such as "Select all -> Install" etc.

** What I think can be improved:

a) I don't like the question mark after "Source", but that's just an artistic thing.

b) If no category is chosen, show "All" or something similar in the dropdown menu.

c) I'm not sure I like the dropdown buttons...

d) The bottom of the dialog looks a little bit alien. Is it a good idea to have the progress bar and close button in the same row?

Leo S said...

Looks pretty good. I would hide the progress bar if there's nothing going on. If it's greyed out, it's just clutter. It's not giving you any additional information, so you might as well hide it.

Unknown said...

Very very good but I do have two suggestions -

One that somebody else pointed out is that the thumbnail pic is way too small to be of any use and whilst scanning lists that is the most important part. I can see that the images don't even use the space that is available to them from top to bottom.

My next point is that the two buttons after the first have their label closer to the previous button than the one that they are announcing making it less obvious what the label is referring to.

Other than that - I like, I like...

Unknown said...

Very very good but I do have two suggestions -

One that somebody else pointed out is that the thumbnail pic is way too small to be of any use and whilst scanning lists that is the most important part. I can see that the images don't even use the space that is available to them from top to bottom.

My next point is that the two buttons after the first have their label closer to the previous button than the one that they are announcing making it less obvious what the label is referring to.

Other than that - I like, I like...

jospoortvliet said...

I agree with some who said the dialog could look less cluttered. One solution would be to use hover buttons, but that's less intuitive. How about using a dialog more like the add-plasmoids thing from Plasma? Use a + sign to install stuff, and put other buttons like the collaboration thing on the bottom. Or even put all buttons on the bottom. The adept idea of having an expanding item is also a bright idea, imho - you can show the buttons only when someone expands the item. And indeed, hiding the progress thing by default would be a good idea.

Vide said...

Very nice work, but I think something needs to be changed:
- too many buttons. If we have 2 buttons for every line, then it soon gets overcrowded (as it is in the screenshot). The "collaborate" button shouldn't be there at all (see below for details)
- about tooltip to see the entire description. Why don't use (don't know if it's technically possible) a box that expands itself just like new QT4 toolbar ">>" button? You know, if you have too many toolbar entries in a QT4 application, there's the classic ">>" (see more, expand, call it as you wish) button which if pressed creates a nice animation of an expanding box, showing all the buttons. You can use something similiar for the description. Moreover, in this expandend area you can add the "collaborate" options, not in a menu but expanded horizontally as hyperlinks