The power of users, and usability

Posted on February 11, 2007 by ereslibre

Short time ago we were discussing at planetkde how users can help KDE project without having programming knowledge. It is, of course, possible. And they really do a great job.If you are good at mockups, draw them. If you can translate, do it. If you have some time to write docs, write them. Well, there are lots of ways helping KDE project, and you can always think for yourself how proud are you for helping such a project.

I saw a mockup (that it was originally for Gnome project) on kde-look and I couldn’t wait to start it. At a first try, I started modifying the exceptional delegate that fredrikh wrote (KFileItemDelegate). Because of the corner drawing, it needed to paint outside of the actual delegate rect, so I had to set clipping property, which is not very good actually. But then, the magical suggestion came from some voices on irc: “Inherit QListView and reimplement paintEvent method”. You had to say it :P .

Well, the screenshot that I attach is with the new class view KListView. It needs of course lots of polishing, and without being official we could even try to do this selection thing plugin-based, so where you see a round square indicating an element is selected, you could be seeing a star, a circumference, a cow, or a heart. Whatever.

You can take a look at the video too.
Hope you like it :)

About ereslibre

Free Software developer and enthusiast. Architect/Developer. Researcher at Complutense University. Web developer. C, C++, PHP, Ruby, Javascript, JQuery, Qt, KDE expert. Rails hacker on the works.
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  • Sébastien Laoût

    Very nice…
    Thanks very much for your work on this!
    It is incredible, KDE4 will rock even more than what I hopped :D

    By “polishing”, I’m sure you meant the border, inner-light border and background gradient (all from the original mockup) ;-)

    But the most important thing is that you should not blue-color the icons anymore when selected.
    It was good in the past because only icons were blue-colored.
    But now, it seems like the selected files/folders are hidden and/or cutted, they seem grayed/made transparent (because of the background blue color).

  • Cylmor

    You are awesome!

    Thank you very much for your work. I love this and the kuiserver.
    Keep up the good work!

    BTW, are you coming to guademy?

    http://www.guademy.org/

  • http://morphado.blogspot.com morphado

    yeaaaaaaaaaaah

    cool thanks guy for this work, your rock

    by the way did you see PAN’s labyrinth not sure about the spelling

  • http://www.ereslibre.es Rafael Fernández López

    Thank you all very much for your feedback :)

    Cylmor, I want to subscribe myself to guademy, but by now, inscription is not possible. I hope I will have place… I would really like to go.

    morphado… hehe thanks. No, I haven’t seen PAN’s labyrinth, why ?

  • 06labs

    i’m looking forward to see your code!!!

    Wonderful

  • http://morphado.blogspot.com morphado

    i don’t know either as your are spanish, the movie pop up in my mind.

    serieusely you are doing a good work, and thanks for the screenshot, sometime we get the doubt that kde4 is more ideas than real code, and seeing actual works make us happy

  • http://opensource-notebook.com/ Daniel Aleksandersen

    Thanks for working on one of my favorite mock-ups!

    If you could get around to working on bug #141519 at KDE Bugs, I would see all my wishes come true for KDE 4! ^^

  • Mogger

    Nice.
    Just curious: In your screenshot, how does it look if you select “backup” and “prueba.pl”?

    Also, as someone wrote to the mailing list; it’s good with choices, but letting the user decide the selection look (plugin based), isn’t that a little bit overkill? I would rather see a good default one.

  • http://www.ereslibre.es Rafael Fernández López

    Mogger,

    They 2 don’t join because they aren’t next to another. I meant next to another not like a world-map, but visually next-to-another.

  • Vladislav

    Thanks for working on this nice little usability/feature. I saw it in gnome-look and thought it would be awesome to have in KDE as well.

    Also, I think that as much as a plugin-based system would be fun, would it be a bit overkill? Like Mogger said, I agree that an excellent default is best (possibly something that followed the color scheme?). On the other hand, I’m sure that some people would love customizing the selection box.

    Thanks again, be well.

    vladislav

  • Mogger

    Rafael Fernández López,
    Sounds great. I missed the “next to each other”-thing, thanks for answering my question so fast.

  • Joni

    awesome. but you use it with dolphin. what is with konqueror?

  • Mike

    Yeah, amazing!

    Hopefully in KDE4 (official version!)!

  • Diego Viola

    Awesome.

    Keep up the excellent work buddy :)

    Looking forward to use and enjoy KDE 4. I know it will be the best! :)