Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-gnome (216 mails)
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Re: [opensuse-gnome] package\selector small UI change proposal
- From: Christian Jäger <christian.jaeger@xxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:41:15 +0200
- Message-id: <1193226075.3102.52.camel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Hello Ricardo, hello all!
Am Dienstag, den 23.10.2007, 15:37 +0100 schrieb Ricardo Cruz:
Yes, when you first mentioned that, I thought 'aha, that's the reason
why categories grow too large and thus hard to navigate'. Is there any
kind of flexibity at all; like changing views of the side-pane? Could we
perhaps solve it by having a kind of 'tabs view', i.e. only the category
selected on the left is shown, and only that category itself is broken
down into sub-categories visible on the right? Combined perhaps with
deeper sub-categories represented by clickable folders which lead to a
sublevel when clicked? (I hope I get across what I mean here... -_-)
Neat trick. ^_^
About 'the full tree'; wouldn't we drop the topmost category anyway
(productivity, amusement)? I don't think novice users find that one
useful.
I thought along the lines of 'click once to mark for install, click
again to undo'. Perhaps a tooltip when hovering the mouse-pointer over
the marked tile would be sufficient, or perhaps an optical hint like
'pressed-down-button'-look?
BTW, here a slightly 'cleaner' version of the inital mockup:
http://img89.imageshack.us/my.php?image=entwurf6ul3.png
Yes; although I have to say, I'm a still a big fan of the way Ubuntu's
'add/remove' dialogue presents information about the applications
(including those intriguing icons; lucky .deb-people... ;)).
In the mockup this information would only appear when the 'details'
button is clicked, but that really was laziness on my part. I think it
would be better to present as much info as possible about the
application - including small icons for alternate versions where
applicable.
Just like the app-browser does, agreed there. The everyday-user needs to
install either specific graphical applications or patterns that enable
him to do something, not packages; those should be pulled as
dependencies without user-interactions (and that's the way it is done
already, thank you!).
Agreed. Wouldn't it be a step-up in user-experience, if a user wasn't
conscious of _using_ a package-manager anymore? It would certainly get
rid of a 'scare-issue' for many.
I think this 'lack of scare' is what Mac-users love so much about their
OS. It seems they hardly ever get into a situation that overburdens
them.
I like drap-and-drop. My IDEAL package manager for computer-novices
would consist of a window of available applications popping up from
which you drag and drop icons into your application-browser. And
uninstall packages by moving them to trash from the application-browser.
How do you think about this as a long-term perspective?
This brings me to another important issue: On many users the wonders of
the contextual dialogue within the app-browser to remove applications or
add them to 'favorites' is completely lost. One will find again and
again, reviewers and blog-writers complaining ' the main menu only has
six entries, and it's all apps that I don't use'.
So it would be good to make it more obvious.
The app-browser seems to support drag-and-drop. Does this go to the
level that we could have areas in the left pane like 'drag here to
uninstall'? (BTW, it would be VERY nice if uninstalling from the
app-browser wouldn't pop up the package-manager to (unncecessarily)
refresh repositories and ask for user-action. A quiet uninstall without
frills after one confirmation would be ideal.)
See this mockup:
http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/7461/beefedupappbrowsersu8.th.png
This can lead to some nag. Windows-applications are actually quite
bothersome IMHO; at least once a day a Windows-app asks me to be
updated.
It does look like a mix of the current two-columns-approach and YaST-QT.
Two columns made sense for the 'installed/not installed'-analogy, I have
troubles finding an analogy here. Could we not get rid of one column? I
must say that for advanced package-management I personally prefer
SmartPM's view - installed and uninstalled packages, and different
versions, simply side-by-side. Such a look could perhaps be integrated
as 'expert/packages-view' into an app-browser-like manager, too?
I don't know exactly why but people constantly complain when there is
more than one way to do something in openSUSE. :p) Though perhaps when
'novice-package-management' is embedded very unobtrusively into the
app-browser they wouldn't realize they have two frontends, and that
probably be OK for them...
Again, it is so great to see that a user-friendly design has a high
priority for the openSUSE-project - thank you all for your time!
Greets,
Chris
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Am Dienstag, den 23.10.2007, 15:37 +0100 schrieb Ricardo Cruz:
The problem with the Application Browser is that it only has one depth
of branches, and the categories tree is mainly two in depth (sometimes
more, like Development->Languages->C++). This isn't an issue for the
usual Applications Browser because it only shows the installed
applications, and only the graphical ones of that. But I'm afraid it
would be a mess for the package selector.
Yes, when you first mentioned that, I thought 'aha, that's the reason
why categories grow too large and thus hard to navigate'. Is there any
kind of flexibity at all; like changing views of the side-pane? Could we
perhaps solve it by having a kind of 'tabs view', i.e. only the category
selected on the left is shown, and only that category itself is broken
down into sub-categories visible on the right? Combined perhaps with
deeper sub-categories represented by clickable folders which lead to a
sublevel when clicked? (I hope I get across what I mean here... -_-)
Possibly we wouldn't need to recreate the widget, we could work around
this by prepadding some whitespaces on the subgroups labels...
Neat trick. ^_^
If we do add the full tree, something it wouldn't allow to, is to see
everything below a certain node together, because the listing is static.
Inclusive, the user couldn't search for some package and press All to
see all the found packages together in the same block. But I guess this
is a very small misfeature.
About 'the full tree'; wouldn't we drop the topmost category anyway
(productivity, amusement)? I don't think novice users find that one
useful.
Something that you didn't show in your mockup is how can the user
revert some action. I guess we could use toggle buttons? About the
I thought along the lines of 'click once to mark for install, click
again to undo'. Perhaps a tooltip when hovering the mouse-pointer over
the marked tile would be sufficient, or perhaps an optical hint like
'pressed-down-button'-look?
BTW, here a slightly 'cleaner' version of the inital mockup:
http://img89.imageshack.us/my.php?image=entwurf6ul3.png
descriptions and other info, I guess that the confirm dialog would
feature those, right?
Yes; although I have to say, I'm a still a big fan of the way Ubuntu's
'add/remove' dialogue presents information about the applications
(including those intriguing icons; lucky .deb-people... ;)).
In the mockup this information would only appear when the 'details'
button is clicked, but that really was laziness on my part. I think it
would be better to present as much info as possible about the
application - including small icons for alternate versions where
applicable.
Anyway, I wonder whether it wouldn't make more sense to make a
dedicated Installer for the newbie. It could just feature all the
essential graphical applications.
Just like the app-browser does, agreed there. The everyday-user needs to
install either specific graphical applications or patterns that enable
him to do something, not packages; those should be pulled as
dependencies without user-interactions (and that's the way it is done
already, thank you!).
For removal, he could use the ordinary
Browser.
Agreed. Wouldn't it be a step-up in user-experience, if a user wasn't
conscious of _using_ a package-manager anymore? It would certainly get
rid of a 'scare-issue' for many.
I think this 'lack of scare' is what Mac-users love so much about their
OS. It seems they hardly ever get into a situation that overburdens
them.
I like drap-and-drop. My IDEAL package manager for computer-novices
would consist of a window of available applications popping up from
which you drag and drop icons into your application-browser. And
uninstall packages by moving them to trash from the application-browser.
How do you think about this as a long-term perspective?
This brings me to another important issue: On many users the wonders of
the contextual dialogue within the app-browser to remove applications or
add them to 'favorites' is completely lost. One will find again and
again, reviewers and blog-writers complaining ' the main menu only has
six entries, and it's all apps that I don't use'.
So it would be good to make it more obvious.
The app-browser seems to support drag-and-drop. Does this go to the
level that we could have areas in the left pane like 'drag here to
uninstall'? (BTW, it would be VERY nice if uninstalling from the
app-browser wouldn't pop up the package-manager to (unncecessarily)
refresh repositories and ask for user-action. A quiet uninstall without
frills after one confirmation would be ideal.)
See this mockup:
http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/7461/beefedupappbrowsersu8.th.png
And, for upgrade, we could have a system that could check for
upgrades, from time to time, whenever the user started an application.
This can lead to some nag. Windows-applications are actually quite
bothersome IMHO; at least once a day a Windows-app asks me to be
updated.
It is important to have a flexible interface so we can easily cope with
the more experience users needs.
Here's a mockup of mine:
http://www.alunos.dcc.fc.up.pt/~c0607045/trash/yast/ricado-split-use-cases.svg
We split completely the user cases. The other pool would be to revert
changes. (Surely, we want to have a one-pool option to keep those guys
happy. And of course, the tiles view.) I wonder whether this makes sense
or if there are use cases, where everything should be together.
It does look like a mix of the current two-columns-approach and YaST-QT.
Two columns made sense for the 'installed/not installed'-analogy, I have
troubles finding an analogy here. Could we not get rid of one column? I
must say that for advanced package-management I personally prefer
SmartPM's view - installed and uninstalled packages, and different
versions, simply side-by-side. Such a look could perhaps be integrated
as 'expert/packages-view' into an app-browser-like manager, too?
I don't know exactly why but people constantly complain when there is
more than one way to do something in openSUSE. :p) Though perhaps when
'novice-package-management' is embedded very unobtrusively into the
app-browser they wouldn't realize they have two frontends, and that
probably be OK for them...
Again, it is so great to see that a user-friendly design has a high
priority for the openSUSE-project - thank you all for your time!
Greets,
Chris
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-gnome+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-gnome+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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