On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 12:22, Aaron J. Seigo <ase...@kde.org> wrote: > On Monday, January 31, 2011, Marco Martin wrote: >> On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 2:22 AM, Aaron J. Seigo <ase...@kde.org> wrote: >> > let's try something big and new. let's make that Big Move and step away >> > from ~/Desktop. >> >> to me the biggest dumb thing is ~/Desktop itself, not much having >> icons on desktop (in the form of folderview applets) >> having n folderviews topic-specific goes very well with the concept of >> activities. >> the biggest hurdle is always the fact of having them in a >> background-ish desktop. > Heh. I find the biggest problem with the traditional Desktop Metaphor is that it holds *too* well - i.e. my ~/Desktop used to look like my physical desktop. :)
> agreed; i do also like the idea of having SAL features right there, though. > it's such a compelling use of widgets-on-the-desktop and looks really pretty > as a bonus. > >> > my proposal is this: >> > >> > * by default, Search and Launch on the desktop >> >> There are several issues with s&l: >> * it's not really done for big screens, > > true > >> there is a sad line of icons sitting in the middle of the desktop > > it actually looks pretty good on large screens. i was surprised by how good, > in fact. Come to think of it, I agree with this. I think the screen in question was a 21", and it looked great! That's not to say it wasn't "wasting" space, but it was still quite impressive. >> * it's not really done for containing applets, would almost mean >> dropping desktop widgets: >> - right now it contains widgets in a little panel like strip with >> horizontal form factor. now overly pretty. >> - making it contain free layout applets like the desktop would look >> quite dirty since applets would cover the launcher icons randomly > > hm, yes, good points. perhaps we could do some sort of melding of what the > newspaper containment does? a search area at the top, with results filling in > below it, and a scrollable grid for widgets below that? Hmm... I like this. One could even imagine a melding of widgets and runners into a sort of transient widget-space: if I can search the Web, look up definitions, and do calculus in a Runner, why couldn't we have other content or interactive widgets that can be called up on demand. This is a bit out there, but it could be an interesting concepts. >> * being always mostly covered by windows limits the usefulness, as i >> said great in dashboard (this is quite true for widgets as well, but >> being smaller the problem is less strong) > > there are a few things we could do to "fix" this... e.g. when you click in the > search edit we could trigger it forward as a dashboard, and we could advertise > the keyboar shortcut for pulling it forward in the click message text of the > search edit? > >> * it empasizes the concept of starting apps, (or "start menu" if you >> want) a lot, that's really something i would like to get away with > Why do you want to get away from that? (I'm not arguing, just curious) > it has / could have more uses than just that, though. a google-on-your-desktop > .. > > if we use our imaginations a bit, i bet we could come up with all sorts of > useful things. e.g. with the widgets runner, it could be used to add widgets > to the desktop in response to queries: "cpu temp<enter>" and there i have a > cpu temp monitor on my desktop. there must be dozens of such ideas? See above ^ :) >> what about having it (or something similar) that appears as a big >> sidebar of the screen when clicking on the K icon? > > well, that'd be krunner or lancelot or raptor :) different concepts imo. > >> > * an icon in this S&L that takes you to your desktop folder .. in a file >> > manager. >> >> could be, i would still rather find a way to encoourage use of >> folderview as activity relevant file containers tough +1 Chani and I were talking about Activity support for KFilePlaces*, which might have some bearing here as well... > i'm trying to imagine a clever way to make it easy to go from a folder > returned as a search result to a folderview on the desktop. it could be > offered as an action on the QueryMatch, for instance, and make it easy to > "pin" that folder to your current activity layout instead of going through the > widget explorer? > >> > * a new panel layout (TBD: let's work on this together!) >> >> > * an "activities" widget (i'll hapilly write it) that sits next to the >> > app launcher and when clicked brings up the actvities manager >> >> there is one on kde-look. however i remeber that you had a valid >> argument against it: it would slowly become basically a replica of the >> activity manager with most-but-not-all of its features. > > indeed; i was simply envisioning a button that would launch the full activity > manager UI. right now it is very hidden. +1 - Jeffery MacEachern _______________________________________________ Plasma-devel mailing list Plasma-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
