On Sun, 2009-10-04 at 09:56 -0700, Денис Невмержицкий wrote: > Hi! > > I want to suggest new interface for Application panel. > It looks like kde's netbook-plasma application tab. I think it is more > usable than accordion. > > Mockup is attached. > > The main ideas are: > - One row for favorite applications > - No "labels" for favorite applications. If application is favorite, i > think user can recognize it only by icon and later will choose it > automatically. > - Using icons for categories, instead of titles. > - Use scrollbar only for applications list block, not for all window. > > Also have idea to remove search bar. Precisely, to reduce its size. Usually, > it is enough to input 3-5 characters to find application. > > What do you think?
Thanks for your time and thought. I agree that the Applications Panel could certainly be improved, and there will be some small tweaks in 2.1 with a more thorough examination in 2.2. Your concept will certainly be used as part of that process. An issue with the KDE style of app launcher is in scale and flexibility with its use of space. Our design deals better with differing numbers of categories, applications and applications within a category - all things that are very important to us. The favourite apps are a good example - if the user wants to select everything as a favourite app then why should we stop them? The interface should merely adapt to show only the applications they're interested in. We don't perfectly achieve that goal in the apps panel for a number of reasons around noatime - but it's the direction we're heading towards. As for icons, descriptions and app titles - we're tweaking the balance the app tile for 2.1 to show slightly less but overall we're quite happy with the information density that it provides in an applications focused panel. You'll note that in myzone, the distillation of the interface, we only show the icon with the title on hover. I would also argue that search is very important to a significant minority of our users - for whom it is their preferred means of interacting with all interfaces. The influence of Google on user preference runs deep. We see this again and again in user tests across all products and markets - users want to see a search box and they want to see it prominently. Overall, Moblin has design principles about the use of space and interaction that are quite different from the KDE Netbook project. There is certainly a legitimate debate as to whether the expandoboxes(/accordion menus) are the best way to achieve all of this - or whether something closer to SUSE's SLAB would work better but I don't feel the KDE interface is as close a match to our goals. We're delighted that they're working on netbook stuff, the more people who optimise their interfaces specifically for devices, the better in our view, but they have different goals. Once again, many thanks for your hard work. As a design team we're certainly very interested in working with the community, especially in our upstream projects but I intend to do better in our stuff as well. We've got a few things to work through internally but I hope to have some good news soonish. Nick --------------------------------------------------------------------- Intel Corporation (UK) Limited Registered No. 1134945 (England) Registered Office: Pipers Way, Swindon SN3 1RJ VAT No: 860 2173 47 This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential material for the sole use of the intended recipient(s). Any review or distribution by others is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender and delete all copies. _______________________________________________ Moblin dev Mailing List [email protected] To manage or unsubscribe from this mailing list visit: http://lists.moblin.org/listinfo/dev or your user account on http://moblin.org once logged in. For more information on the Moblin Developer Mailing lists visit: http://moblin.org/community/mailing-lists
