KPluginSelector reworking

Posted on May 9, 2007 by ereslibre

This was something Kate developers suggested me (and others). This dialog needed some love. As you can see, I draw “categories” here as I do on dolphin, asking for KStyle to do it (so categories here will be drawn exactly as they are on dolphin). If QStyle found instead of KStyle it will fallback for a default drawing. I know, KStyle changes haven’t been committed yet, and I hope they will, because they give us some advantages (as the one you can see here):

 

Of course there is some work to do right now, but I want to know what do you think about this preliminar appearance.

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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  • Diederik

    Cool! These are the small things that make KDE4 much better. :) And make it feel much changed, instead of having old ugly dialogs popping up again.

  • http://paul.giannaros.org Paul Giannaros

    Really like it. Far cleaner to have distinctions presented like that, but what is the difference between a ‘Tool’ and an ‘Extension’? Does it really matter?

  • Hans Chen

    I think it looks very nice and useful.

    Just a thought: how would it look if disabled items really look like they are disabled (gray text etc.)? Maybe even hide the ‘Configure’ option. But the checkbox should look checkable, and once you check it the item becomes “enabled”.

    Another, a little bit off topic, thought: when talking about categories, I think it would be perfect to use in the progress manager:
    http://static.kdenews.org/dannya/vol4_devel_uiserver.png

    I have posted comments (and some mockups) before in your blog, where I wrote that the icons in my opinion take too much space, and vertical text is probably not the best choice. But categories like in the KPluginSelector screenshot you posted, that would be great.

    Thank you for your hard work, keep it up.

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

    Hi all,

    Thanks for your comments.

    Paul, well I really don’t know the difference between them but it is just an example, and is the way the app added those plugins (Konqueror in this case). KPluginSelector just let you add plugins into categories. It is the app work to determine in which category the plugin fits.

    Hans, well about the disabled items being painted different, that is something I will ask the usability people. Probably it is a good idea. Hiding the “Configure” option is not the best idea for me. I think the best thing we could do here is to make it appear disabled too.

    About categories at kuiserver, it is not ready for them, but maybe some day we can achieve this goal (if needed). For now, it would be great to see it growing up and being stable. We have always time to improve it.

    Thank you again for all your comments guys.

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

    I think it looks nice. However you do need more, and more spesific categories. How about Page rendering, Web developer tools, and Accesibility?

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

    Hi Daniel,

    I think I explained myself wrong. Categories are given by the application too. What KPluginSelector does is receive a set of categories and a set of plugins in this or that category, and KPluginSelector will show it at that category, that was previously given by the application.

    Bye and thanks !!