I had to do it :)
I had some suggestions of removing the link “About” and “More Options” from KPluginSelector and making them buttons. Well, the problem wasn’t trivial, but after spending some hours on it I managed to get almost real widgets on it. I think it works quite nice. Here are some screenshots, showing that it respects too if the user selected on “kcmshell style” that he/she doesn’t want icons on buttons:
Well, I know english is not a RTL language, but for testing purposes I had to force the dialog to be RTL. Here are the results:
Categories: KDE Development
You really need to make “no icon” the default. In my opinion, it’s totally unreasonable to ask icon theme designers (even the Oxygen ones) to draw an icon for each of the KWin effects. Please, make it so that only specifically specified icons are displayed, and that we get rid of all the question mark icons.
It might be a little late so say this, but the most important (and big in size) widget of the whole menu should be the check box (the place for the user to enter his decision). Yet it is very, very small. Why not make it as big as e.g. the icons. This will get priorities right and allow the user to easily apply his decision (without having to carefully place the cursor). Believe me, right now one has to think and look at least twice before finding out that this little square at the right (the checkbox) existst and that this is the main item of the whole screen.
Having said that, I really appreciate the work so far and am very happy to follow the progress being constantly made!
Jakob,
The “no icon” thing is not about that. It is regarding buttons. On the “kcmshell style” dialog you are able to (un)check the “Icons on buttons” option. That is what the KPluginSelector respects. Now talking about the KWin effects icon stuff, they are lots of icons to work on, but I think the Oxygen team with time is able to do it if needed. If not, a general icon can be applied for all effects.
Markus,
Well, this is more a usability issue than a technical problem. It is not late at all. It would need to change a line of code or so. Nothing more, but the problem is that I am not so sure if it is good to have a checkbox with a size 64×64 for example. It just breaks the consistency with the rest of the system, mainly because nowhere on the rest of the system there are such big check boxes. If it is visible or not, Oxygen style is being developed and lots of things need to be fixed. Try it yourself with the Plastique style for example, you will notice the checkbox at the moment. The problem with the style that I made the shots (oxygen style) is that the background is the same color as the checkbox background, so what makes you see the checkbox is its shadow, and that is not enough, of course.
Thanks for you comments and ideas
Hi Rafael,
It’s nice to see you hacking again. I think the result looks very good (especially buttons with icons – it’s good that it follows the style settings).
I usually have to complain about something, but this time I can’t find anything to complain about. Instead I’ll throw you some question:
- Why is it “More Options”? – I fail to see why there should be a “More”, as, in my opinion, there isn’t any options for the plugin (apart from enable/disable).
- In your screenshot, it seems that the new buttons are white, while the standard Oxygen button is grayish. I think it looks very nice, but my question is: how does it look with other styles like Plastik, some Mac OS X style etc.?
- Is it possible to show both “About” and “More Options”?
- And finally, is it possible to assign shortcut keys to the About/More Options buttons? Or rather, assign shortcuts to buttons of the selected plugin.
Thanks for showing us this, and keep up with the wonderful work!
Hi Hans,
> It’s nice to see you hacking again. I think the result looks very good (especially buttons with icons – it’s good that it follows the style settings).
Hehe, well rather than hacking, blogging. I haven’t stopped hacking anytime
Thanks !!
> I usually have to complain about something, but this time I can’t find anything to complain about. Instead I’ll throw you some question:
Hehe, OK, let’s go:
> – Why is it “More Options”? – I fail to see why there should be a “More”, as, in my opinion, there isn’t any options for the plugin (apart from enable/disable).
Yeah. Plugins admit options. When you click on the button of “More Options” a dialog with a tab appears. It can have as much as configuration tabs as needed, and the last tab is the “About” one.
If you click on “More Options” on word completion, you will be able to select if you want a list to autopopup or not, and with how many characters written.
If you click on “More Options” on KWin effects, you will be able to configure directly those settings for KWin.
> – In your screenshot, it seems that the new buttons are white, while the standard Oxygen button is grayish. I think it looks very nice, but my question is: how does it look with other styles like Plastik, some Mac OS X style etc.?
What happens is that Oxygen buttons currently are transparent. So what seems to you grayish is because of the background they’re on is gray. As listviews are white, they look more white, but just take a look when the row alternates color, buttons look different because of that: because they’re transparent
With Plastik or Plastique, as their buttons are not transparent, it looks as the rest of the buttons (those that are on dialogs).
> – Is it possible to show both “About” and “More Options”?
No. A plugin that has been detected to have at least one configuration page will have “More Options”, where when clicking will be able to see the “About” information. And those plugins that haven’t got any configuration dialog, show “About” for popping up the author information about the plugin and related info.
> – And finally, is it possible to assign shortcut keys to the About/More Options buttons? Or rather, assign shortcuts to buttons of the selected plugin.
I think is possible, but is a bit tricky. All “About” would have then for example “Ctrl+A”, and only the selected one pops up ? Well then you could just “TAB”, and then “SPACE”. Having same shortcuts for different elements is not intuitive and can lead to problems. Qt has an algorithm for determining shortcuts for different elements on dialogs, but the problem here is that we could have 100 elements on the dialog and probably all of them without configuration dialog, then we would have 100 “About” buttons. How could we give different shortcuts to them ?
Thanks for your comments !!
@Rafael
>> Yeah. Plugins admit options. When you click on the button of “More Options” a dialog with a tab appears. It can have as much as configuration tabs as needed, and the last tab is the “About” one.
I think the question was, why is the text of the button “More Options” instead of just “Options”? There aren’t really any options visible before you click “More Options”, so the more is redundant.
Rafael,
It’s always fun to comment on your work, as you give fast and good answers. This time was no exception.
About “More Option”, Leo S hit the spot; I’ve seen in your last screenshot that it’s called “Settings” now. One thumb up.
> What happens is that Oxygen buttons currently are transparent.
Oh, had no idea about that.
> As listviews are white, they look more white, but just take a look when the row alternates color, buttons look different because of that: because they’re transparent
Didn’t notice that before, it becomes much more apparent with the Kopete screenshot. I like it very much (even though the Oxygen style has lots of room for improvement) – two thumbs up.
>> Is it possible to show both “About” and “More Options”?
> No.
Edit: Yes. (Sorry, couldn’t resist). I liked how it looked before with only one button, but I agree that it doesn’t really make sense the way with only “Options” button. Three thu.. no wait. (Sometimes it’s hard to be a KDE user
).
About the shortcuts, I imagined the problem, and probably agree with you that it’s better to tab. Firefox “solves” this by only showing the buttons of the selected plugin, but I think I prefer the way KPluginSelector does.
A possible solution is that only the buttons of the selected plugin gets the +Letter shortcuts (For example, &About). But this probably leads to more problems than being helpful.
Once again, thanks for your quick and kind reply.
Hey Hans,
>It’s always fun to comment on your work, as you give fast and good answers. This time was no exception.
About “More Option”, Leo S hit the spot; I’ve seen in your last screenshot that it’s called “Settings” now. One thumb up.
Ah thanks for that
Yeah I called it “Settings” because on the rest of the system (Konqueror, Kate…) the menu that goes for configuring options is called always “Settings”.
> Edit: Yes. (Sorry, couldn’t resist). I liked how it looked before with only one button, but I agree that it doesn’t really make sense the way with only “Options” button. Three thu.. no wait. (Sometimes it’s hard to be a KDE user
).
Yeah is possible right now. I found something (and others told me) strange having to go to “Options”, “Settings” or “More Options” for reading the “About” information of the plugin.
> Once again, thanks for your quick and kind reply.
Thanks to you all
Hey Rafael,
> The “no icon” thing is not about that. It is regarding buttons.
Yah, I think you got me wrong here, as I just used this blog entry to comment on a quite unrelated other issue in the plugin selector. So, my comment didn’t refer to buttons at all (sorry if I wasn’t clear enough) but rather to the “plugin icons” that are displayed on the left of each plugin row.
> Now talking about the KWin effects icon stuff, they are lots of icons to work on,
> but I think the Oxygen team with time is able to do it if needed.
I’m a bit involved with Oxygen stuff, and there’s a ridiculous amount of icons to draw, and we’ve only got time until October. I say we won’t have KWin effect icons until then.
But that’s not the point:
> If not, a general icon can be applied for all effects.
I think this is the wrong way to approach it. Icons should be there to emphasize a special meaning, like in the menus where the more important menu entries get an icon and the less important don’t. Granted, there’s no specific more/less important differentiation for plugins, but the point is that no icon is better than a generic one that doesn’t say much about the purpose of the item. (Imagine all 36 (!) icons of the KWin effects to display the generic window icon – I say that’s very awkward.)
I would ask you to
1. remove the icon column if none of the plugins have an icon defined, and
2. don’t display the question mark icon if there’s no icon given in the .desktop file.
Or maybe KPluginSelector already works this way and the KWin KCM messes stuff up. In that case, sorry for the riot :-]
Jakob,
> I would ask you to
> 1. remove the icon column if none of the plugins have an icon defined, and
Interesting.
> 2. don’t display the question mark icon if there’s no icon given in the .desktop file.
Or all have icons or none. The above solution is far better.
> Or maybe KPluginSelector already works this way and the KWin KCM messes stuff up. In that case, sorry for the riot :-]
Nah, the 1st solution can be happily applied. I think I will need to take a look over to check if no icon specified or not existing one and apply the 1st solution you suggest.
In the case of KWin, the problem is not that no icons are specified. Every effect has an icon entry on their .desktop files. The problem is that those icons are not found, so the icon loader places the question mark instead.
Thanks !
Looks really good, thanks for your work on Kopete!