Shaping up the time for KDE.
Just some more images of the work done so far on the extensions for the plasma clock, that i have been working on with
Riccardo Iaconelli. Right now i´m working on a time zone extension.
The one you can see here is the date extension... Basically, what you get when clicking the date area ;).
And a more integrated version.
Riccardo Iaconelli. Right now i´m working on a time zone extension.
The one you can see here is the date extension... Basically, what you get when clicking the date area ;).
And a more integrated version.
DIGG
Comments
A default looking like this one would be better. Or if not, another third different.
The date extension shown in this post is too really cool.
Superstoned, yes i stated that in my previus post.
But layout has deep impact on looks so i have some opinons on layout issues...
In the end its up to the one making the code the final decision...
Really, Excellent 5* Mock!
take a look at this to see what the gnome guys did. i'd love to see a kontact integration like this:
http://www.ogmaciel.com/?p=396
The current (3.5 style) taskbar layout is much more sensible, although not as pretty.
Remember, form _follows_ function, not the other way around.
http://nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/rect3048.png
Do you realize this might be the best-looking style for choosing your virtual desktop...
cubes are lame, switching just like that is lame but this.... is perfect, sexy it's gorgeos... I SO WANT THIS IN KDE 4 !! :D
and the blue wallpaper is great !!!
Regarding the kicker mockup the central K is a step backwards since you lose the corner as one of the easiest targets one could possibly hit with a mouse.
The two-row taskbar from ancient KDE1 times has major drawbacks, too: the bottom row can easily be hit with the mouse since it "merges" into the infinity of the screen edge. The top row however is extremely difficult to hit because you have to exactly aim for its entries with the cursor.
The same applies to the systray. The items in its bottom row can easily be hit vertically, since they have an infinite size. The top row of the systray icons however is even more difficult to hit than the top taskbar row because they are even smaller and lack the help of the screen edge.
I hope I won't have to wait for KDE5 until these major deficiencies are finally taken serious and fixed.
About the bar, well i say it againg is just my vision but for the record, the systemtry right now in kiquer has no infinite space so no big modification there, the taskbar should have the apps ligned in the botom only then should they apear on top. so we would be talking about somthing like 33% of your hits.
As it goes, the fact that everything is so close togueter is very good has it eanbles you to look at the intire bar in a glance, no more visual scroll to find that link/icon you wont have to move your mouse so much so you will get beter Fits'law results, I have some rather big experience with this aproach of a bar as I been using it for several years, with superkaramba. Its very usable and is is were most of the action is going on, the midle of the screen, specily on the new wide screen trend.
A intire with bar is almost unusable on big wide screnns moving the mouse to the corner is actuly harder that to the midle couse the distance is shorter, and vertical mouse movement is not that big still.
On the other hand, the kmenu importance is droping for other methods of louching apps like krunner and find tools.
But hey this is just my ideas on the subject, i agrea they might be controversal, please share yours aswell.
99.9% of people has no idea what you're talking about.
OTOH, who cares what you have to say if you're stupid enough to write in Spanish on (international) internet forums...
Will it be possible to use a traditional kicker panel in 4.0? The taskbar in this example is cool but would take up way too much screen space on subcompact laptops with 1024x768 screens. (Speaking from experience as a 12" powerbook user.)
And could you please show me this written rule where on international forums English is the only allowed language? Why isn't it Mandarin since that is the most spoken language anyway?
Finally, if you happen to read the profile of the owner of this blog you should realize that he is Portuguese to. So, do us a favour and crawl back into your hole.
And it was Portuguese, not Spanish that those guys were using.
More on topic, Nuno, I love your sense of aesthetics and it is good to have people around that finally articulate an aesthetic vision for KDE4.
We need this type of leadership in our community,because it will lead to more people discussing the boundaries between usability, ergonomics and aesthetics and eventually lead to the creation of a better desktop. So keep on sharing your vision, because I for one like where you are heading.
The only things I do agree with is that it is important to be able to move back and forth in the calendar as it is a great way to check on a future date.
Thanks for your hard work.
I can speak *good enough* english, so at least the majority of people know what I'm talking about. Otherwise I wouldn't post on any english forums (I know, most of you probably would like that).
I understand that the K button in the center might be good for widescreen and that the wasted space might not be so big for you, but large widescreen users are an rich geeky minority. I hope that the defaut themes and plasmoids for KDE4 will be sane, and usable in all common screen resolutions.
Acording to W3 statistics, in the start of this year 14% of people surfing the web was using 800x600 screen resolutions, and the percentage is probably more if you include also the computers that don't have internet access. The 1024x768 resolution is also responsible by half of the hits. While the 800x600 percentage is diminishing, it is still considerable, and the 1024x768 is fairly stable.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp
@nuno: Mesmo com tudo o que eu disse, beleza é o que não falta nesses plasmoids.
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/rect3048.png
The trend clearly show the amout of available dots on screnn, this is my vision for a desktop look for a 5 to 7 years sicle if the trend keeps up by that time this look will be ok for most of our ecosystem and specyly to boost the number in our ecosystem.
> modification there
But isn't KDE4 about improving things? Laying out the systray icons in one horizontal line, making all of them edge aware - that would improve things. Keeping the old system just for the sake of tradition and looks is simply irresponsible. There are so many examples out there where good looks come along with horrid usability. Your mockup is another one.
Have you actually read what Fitts' Law is all about? Have you taken the time and measured the horizontal and vertical size of the systray icons and taskbar entries. Have you put everything into the formulas provided by Fitts and related research? If you had you would have realized that your proposed approach is performing really bad.
Nuno, sorry, but I have the impression you have not the faintest idea what you are talking about. Please refresh your research about Fitts' Law and start designing from scratch again.
And other suggestion: use icons to launch apps and as the taskbar... i mean, like osx dock or AWN.
That would save a lot of space.
Think about it, the fact that other OS use that implementation doesn't mean KDE4 can't use it.
It would be very very good.
First: it looks very nice.
Second: about the clock style, i agree with someone here asking for making the horizontal line of the numbers thinner.
Thanks and keep up the good work!
What does it basically say?? well
MT = a + b log2(2A/W)
were
MT = movement time
a,b = regression coefficients
A = distance of movement from start to target center
W = width of the target
Well now this formula must be taken with grain of salt specially to the width of trget, if an object is close to a border it has infinite width. in the corner it has "double infinite with". (the formula does not take that in to consideration btw).
The idea is to minimize the MT.
Has a general idea making everything on the border would be better for the width thing, but i think that the fact that the screens are becoming beguer and the fact that you youhave to use 2 mouse movement to reach one corner is very bad, the formula does not take that into consideration, its just a general proposed formula that some times gives good results.
Also and in order to keep things well balanced i wanted that the bar was as small as possible so again you wont need to lift the mouse to go from one side to the other of the bar, also so that you can precive the entire bar just by looking at it.
The idea is that if you can drag the mouse fast to a determinate area were you clear know that want you are looking for is, you can easily click it. the mouse movement precision is kite good on a small radius around were it is right now, (think the formula does only linearly take that into consideration, think that is rader exponential in the short radius.
Also task bar it can become huge and you will have to scroll it visually until you find what you are looking for wen you find it you will probably need to mouse movements to click it so the amount of time was vastly superiorly to the one on my design.
Well i have loads of more arguments on the subject, yes i did thought about it for some time.
Also, I think all of the submitted wallpapers should be able to download on kde-look.org. There seems to be too much good stuff to only publicise a few of them.
> yes i did thought about it for some time.
Good, then you must be able to answer some more questions:
> Well now this formula must be taken with grain of
> salt specially to the width of trget, if an object
> is close to a border it has infinite width. in the
> corner it has "double infinite with".
> (the formula does not take that in to consideration btw).
The original article by Fitts doesn't. However, there is subsequent research that offers various refinements to the formula and does cover both axes.
> Also task bar it can become huge and you will have
> to scroll it visually until you find what you are
> looking for wen you find it you will probably need
> to mouse movements to click it so the amount of
> time was vastly superiorly to the one on my design
A good deal on your argumentation is based on the "fact" that a taskbar with two rows can be scanned more quickly. How come? After all the amount of information is the same.Counting the width and height of the entries, even the projected area is the same. The difference is that now
- two rows have to be scanned.
- there is a break in the flow of scanning since at the end of the first row, one has to switch to the beginning of the other one.
- generally the entries have to be read both vertically and horizontally.
Question: Why is this actually faster? Proof?
Question: How do you plan to address the rearrangement problem? With a layout that has two rows, entries are constantly being rearranged and jumping around. So at one time entry A is in the first row. Now another task is added with the consequence that entry A suddenly is in the other row. How is this supposed to make repeated scanning easy/quick? The systray has the same problem.
Question: You repeatedly said that widescreen displays are the future. Widescreen displays imply that there is more horizontal than vertical space. Your proposal uses two rows and thus more vertical than horizontal space. How does using valuable vertical real screen estate and at the same time leaving cheap horizontal space unused fit with your observation?
And one more thing about Fitts: You actually measured the distances and icon sizes and applied the formula?
It would give a great usability study just defining those aspects.
The fact that i did not applied the formula does not mean i cant understand it and predict results.
Has I'm sure you can anonymous.
but has i say i think fitts law should taken with a grain of salt specially cause its takes no consideration the fact that mouse movement and precision is not a linear progression according to distance but rather a different progression that grows exponentially, becomes linear then has a huge jump (need to lift the mouse to move further) and goes linear again.
Faster identification of app...
Well normally that is fastly done by the icon if they are close together you can see them all at once
Vertical space, well 2 rows that are smaller than the launch icon 48x48 px, so no wasted space there, Ofcourse that if the screen is smaller than a given number the bar should have a smaller launch icon and hence just one Row
If the bar with is bigger 75% screen width its should go into a more normal aproach has what we win in does not worth what we loose...
the way the bar scales is should be done in a way that is discreet with the bar becoming bigger until a max value and the app text area becoming smaller.
Thanks for your coments.
Btw if you what to discuss it further im at #oxygen.
I never liked so huge panel, it kinda gets on my way, especially with widescreen displays.
and that kinda elemitates the function of keeping everything toghether.
I think if the taskbar and the clock-calender where only on that clack background it would look quite sexy....
and i have to add so far i really like the calender-clock, gj ! :D
Otherwise, looking great.
Parabéns!
Fitt's Law is not the be-all and end-all of user interface design. It only speaks to time-to-target. Fitt's law does not take into account object recognition, functional locality or grouping, acceleration/deceleration profiles of the pointing device, discoverablity, among several others. It is foolish to design the entirety of the UI to satisfy Fitt's Law. KDE 4 would end up with little more than 4 hot corners overloaded with desktop functions. Doesn't mean we should ignore Fitt's Law, there is definitely immense value there, but you don't rearrange everything satisfy it either.
Ohhhh and yes.
Besides wanting to say that I like the design, I also want to say that I really appreciate that you have a fresh view on things, and are not swayed too easily.
I think it's incredibly rude the way in which people are criticizing your work without trying it. Besides, we all know KDE, and surely everything is customizable to the pixel.
I for one am glad someone is trying something new. Even if the final design isn't as usable as we'd hoped, you tried something.
Anyway, I love it.
Filip
The KDE4 project is willing to make the desktop evolve; breaking existing rules might (and must!) be part of that process.
If the taskbar finally doesn't convince the majority of users, it can be replaced in further versions of KDE4 by another UI concept; that's what it's all about ;)
Anyway, it's all damn awesome, can't wait!
Anyway, love the calendar too, have to, seeing as it's using the calendar system classes I'm overhauling :-). I hope the ability to switch calendar systems gets included,,,
For those of you worried about the need to tuck as much of the GUI as possible at the corners, I can't recall Fitt's papers mentioning anything like that. In fact, there are way more efficient and unobstrusive ways to satisfy Fitt's law. A good set of contextual menus is a good example: the controls are right there, on the spot where you click your mouse (zero travelling distance), and your target "widget" is the whole desktop, no less (~infinite surface).
Anyone here has ever used Alias Maya, the powerfull 3D package? Maya uses a sort of "context menu on steroids", combining well laid-out, angular (pie) menus with full context-awareness and basic mouse gestures. The menu appeared at the tap of the spacebar, and its content would change depending on the type of object you were pointing to. Screenshot here:
http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/info/maya/manual/UserGuide/Overview/images/WorkingMaya.fm.anc1.gif
Now, I can't remember having ever used a GUI in which one felt so focused, so productive. The interface was just "there", waiting for the user to be invoked with a quick key tap, though it never felt on your way, it never distracted you away from the creative proccess.
Anyway, my point is -and I think I agree with Nuno here- The GUI does NOT have to present all the information all the time. If you display too much important information at once, it becomes unimportant. An always-visible part of the GUI, such as Kicker, should present ONLY essential information (eg: the most frequently switched-to applications, a few common shortcuts, the clock and perhaps a CPU metter or something). Everything else should be still easily accessible, but NOT necessarily on the screen.
I know it will never happen but, boy, would it be cool having stuff like those pie menus integrated in KDE's Plasma. I think they could work very well with the planned new "zooming interface". Here's to hope!
What can I as an user do to ensure that the panel looks this way in KDE 4.0 release? This is just damn cool.
If the desktop looks like this in KDE 4.0, I will definitely say the "WOW!" which I couldn't tell for Vista.
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