Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-gnome (216 mails)

[Christian Jäger <christian.jaeger@xxxxxx>]

Hello,


Am Montag, den 29.10.2007, 22:34 +0000 schrieb Ricardo Cruz:
> Hi,
>
>  Sorry for taking awhile.
>
>  It seems people are interested interested in using PackageKit
> (http://www.packagekit.org/) which is meant to be a common package and
> update manager interface common for all distributions, they would just
> adapt the backend.
>  But such work would require quite some effort, and there doesn't seem
> to exist any serious effort at the moment, so we should probably work
> out yast-gtk's selector.

They seem to want to go in the same direction, judging from the mock-ups
on their page. So perhaps there can be some reciprocal code-contribution
at a later time? Other than that, I agree. There are many merits in
PackageKit but no advantage in usability; the project is too young to
have received much user-feedback.

> Qua, 2007-10-24 às 13:41 +0200, Christian Jäger escreveu:
> > >  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?
>  Sure, you mean a Toggle Button, right? As in (paste to terminal):
*snip*

I'm certainly missing some dev-packages in order for your python script
to work - but I meant something akin to the 'active' look that you get
when the mouse-cursor is hovering over a template. It seems very
intuitive to me that a button that looks 'pressed down' can be released
again by pressing (=clicking) once more; and also that I still have to
press some 'activation'-button ('perform actions', in this case) in
order to set something in motion.


> > > 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
>
>  I guess you don't mean Synaptic, do you? Could you get me a shot of
> that program?

Found an image here:
http://www.movingtofreedom.org/images/2007/03/ubuntu-add-remove-applications.jpg
I guess it is 'Synaptic in disguise'; pretty much standard, really - but
the simple categorization, the nicely detailed descriptions of the
applications and the colourful icons set it apart.

This is not what I would want for openSUSE, but it is a list-view done
right IMHO.


> > (including those intriguing icons; lucky .deb-people... ;)).
>  We could copy them, we don't need to use the ugly ones from yast-qt. :)

;)

> > In the mockup this information would only appear when the 'details'
> > button is clicked
>
>  Okay. I just think its too "buried", so I would vote to just have the
> info (on tabpages, like now) already visible there. I think most user
> would want to take a look at Details anyway, and it is much more
> comfortable for those that want to check the Details of several packages
> (e.g. when choosing a word processor).

Yes, all info should be visible after clicking just one time. Otherwise
this would loose out in terms of usability to the old package-manager.

> > , 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.
>  I am not sure what you mean by small icons. I guess we would want to
> have a combo box like:
>
> Version: | 10.5 \/ |
> Repo: opensuse.org
> Details: ...........
>  ...................
>  ...................
>   |Cancel| |Install|
>
>  The repo and maybe other fields would change as the user chooses a
> version.

By 'small icons' I only meant that the options presented for
multi-version packages would differ slightly from your design above.
Instead of 'cancel / install' it would then be 'install from a)-, b)-,
c)-repo / cancel' where 'a)', 'b)' and 'c' would look nicest if
represented by friendly icons. But icons might not be easily done, and
it is not important, anyway. The main thing is that different versions
would be installable from this view.



> > 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?
>  I think Apple's success here has more to do with the fact that
> applications are self-contained. They are just some package file that
> you double-click, and independently where it is, it runs.

[OT]If it were so easy... Actually I find their implementation of a good
idea quite bad - in most cases you click on a .dmg-file, which results
in mounting a virtual CD (now, how intuitive is that?) which presents
which yet another windows where you see an icon of the application and
an icon representing your applications folder; beneath it the
instruction to drag the application-icon onto the application-folder. I
don't understand why they don't dumb it down and let the user drag .dmgs
onto their application-folder.[/OT]

>  Anyway, I think a nice installer's interface could very well compete
> with that system in terms of ease of use. People are already familiar
> with iTunes and other music repos apps, so it could very well work for
> packages.

Agreed. Just for fun, a quick mockup to show what I meant:
http://img477.imageshack.us/my.php?image=dragdropxz7.png


> > 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'.
> >
> > *snip* *mockup* *snip*
>
>  Yep, that's an issue, and your mockup solves it nicely. You should
> definitively open some bug report on that
> (https://bugzilla.novell.com/).

I had my 'enhancement'-bug reports repeatedly closed on me and been told
bugzilla is not for that; so I won't. Perhaps I will put it into some
feature-request-list on the Wiki.


>  What could be confusing about the mockup is that the Actions items
> looks like the Group ones, so you get the feeling they are buttons... If
> Actions was aligned to the bottom that might be enough to make it clear
> they are distinct (and they really should be aligned to the bottom
> anyway since they are not that frequently used to deserve such a visible
> spot).
>
>  And to make it clear that the user can drag things there, maybe they
> should have a sunken shadow. Actually, I think you could just have the
> three sunken medium-size icons, no labels. And the user would get a
> tooltip on mouse hover.

Yes, excellent!

>  Something important about uninstall is that the user shouldn't care about
> dependencies. So, if it tells Skencil to uninstall, but keeps Inkspace,
> Skencil should not actually be uninstalled, just hidden. (Possibly a
> dialog for the user to confirm that.)
>
> > (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.)
>  Right, though I'd say the popups madness ought to be addressed
> first. ;)
>
> > >  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.
>
>  The revert column would have a fixed size... But okay, simple check
> marks should make more sense.
>
> >  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? 
>  SmartPM is similar to yast-qt in this aspect, right?
>
>  I like it more task oriented... Maybe we could have both worlds;
> display all packages in the different actions. The package would just be
> either enabled/disabled depending whether the action applies or not. :/

Or maybe use package-kit for advanced actions and the
'app-browser-integrated' package-management for novice-mode?

Thanks for your interest.

Greets,
Chri

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