Hello Ricardo, hello all! 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.s...
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@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-gnome+help@opensuse.org