Wednesday, May 21, 2008
krunner quicky update
I put together a quick screencast to update one of our artists on what's happened to krunner in the last day. It's not really meant as a promo piece, but you get to hear me meander about through the new things that popped up in the last 24 hours so I figured maybe one or two of you might want to check it out as well. Still lots of polishing left, particularly in the artwork dpt. Enjoy the ogg-iliciousness, all 5MB of it.
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16 comments:
I'm pretty sure you don't like to read it, but what I'd be really fond of is the possibility to disable all this stuff and to have the simple and basic minicli functionality and style back.
@nonymous: "the possibility to disable all this stuff and to have the simple and basic minicli functionality and style"
please be more specific. describe exactly what you want, why you want it, how you use it, etc.
Good work; it looks easy to use and nice to look at. Have you thought about using a table with icons instead of just icons with small text overlays? If I type in "Bach" and have a krunner for amarok, I'm going to get a huge list of "Bach" songs that I could play. By using a small icon, there's no room to display the full song name. With the current version, I seems like I would just see tens of amarok icons with "Play Bach..." written on them and it would force me to tab through them all to find the right one (which would make krunner a very slow way of doing what I wanted). You could still have the cool animations and icons, just use a vertical table with icons on the left and big descriptions on the right.
I'd also like it if you could make the krunner box larger to fit this table. When I'm trying to launch stuff with ALT+F2 in KDE3.5 at the moment, I very very rarely hit ALT+F2 and then start clicking other windows, selecting stuff to copy/paste (as I do this prior to ALT+F2). For this reason, making the krunner box small just seems to be an artificial limitation that doesn't leave room for longer descriptions. I'm open to suggestions on how to make my suggestions more helpful. :-) I could do a mock up if my suggestions are not clear.
and lots of room for text and/or making the box bigger
Wishes:
-Tab Completion (konq[tab] expands to konque)
-kopete integration for contacts
I am eager to try kde 4.1, in the meantime thank your for your blog. Your are quite talkative, but this is my favorite kde blog so far. (Must be the bling bling thing).
Just a quick notre regarding the krunner preview, could you try to display the suggested application aligned left rather than centered ?
Watching the video my eyes kept switching between what you were typing, and the title in the middle.
That's really a minor nitpick on an unfinished feature...
Anyway keep up the good work, and can't wait KDE release !
How did you take the screen capture? The best tool I have seen was Istanbul.
Looks very cool, but there also should be an option to have a simple runner dialog like in KDE 3. I think that's also what the first poster meant.
@blueget
>> Looks very cool, but there also should be an option to have a simple runner dialog like in KDE 3.
The key question to ask is _why_?
An option to get old behaviour back is not useful without a good explanation of why the new behaviour is inferior. So what part of the new behaviour does not work as well as the old one? Only if you can answer that question is there any reason at all for adding an option or anything else.
@anonymous
Tab completion is no longer needed, since when you type konq you get konqueror already, no need to hit tab.
Finally new screencasts. Huzzah!
The new interface for Krunner is closer to the one I imagined when I first heard of it. It does, as you said, need a lot of polishing, but it already looks very neat. Way to go.
One thing I don't like right now is how the focus is handled. The textbox should IMO always have focus, but you should be able to browse and run a command from the results without tabbing. I like Katapult's approach (you can't edit the text you've typed other than using backspace or clearing it) but I guess it won't work very well here. Or will it?
Hm. That way Krunner could work like this:
Alt+F2, start typing something. Browse the results with the arrow key and launch with return (no tab required). Backspace deletes the last character entered and Delete clears the textbox. Escape closes the dialog.
The textbox has always focus. If you want to change the text while browsing you just have to type - without worring about tabbing/using the mouse.
The "browse with arrow keys while textbox has focus" feature conflicts with moving the text cursor and browsing the history. But how many edit the text they've typed anyway? I don't think you should have to type more than 4-5 characters before finding your desired item; is it really important to be able to go back to say the second character to edit it? Personally I prefer to just clear the text and start from the beginning...
About the history, how about displaying the n last commands when the dialog is first shown and no text has been entered? I'm a little skeptical about this as it may be confusing and make the dialog look less clean, but it would be interesting to hear your thoughts about this too.
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No, maybe I should just stick with Katapult. :D
But still, even if it's not going to be the way I described, is the focus handling going to be improved?
I have nothing but praise, this is not only a good replacement for Katapult (Quicksilver alternative it self) but looks to be better. Huzzah.
A question though - when you typed in Mail and it displayed several alternatives such as Mail (to run Kmail/Mailody I guess) and then it had a few 'mail to *' options. I was wondering if Krunner had queried Strigi for sent mails or were they alternative contacts to mail to?
@anonymous: "Have you thought about using a table with icons instead of just icons with small text overlays"
trying to avoid that, actually =) if i can't get this to work respectably, then we'll just have each item show all its text and make rowStride == 1 in the code (it's really that simple =)
i may even make it an option to swap between those two modes in 4.2. since the code impact would be beyond minimal.
"I'd also like it if you could make the krunner box larger to fit this table."
you can make it bigger already, but you have to do it via the window menu (alt+f3 by default). i'll add a grippy thing soon though; it already saves/restores the window size.
@anonymous: "kopete integration for contacts"
just need to get one of the kopete (or decibel?) guys to write up a runner plugin =)
@anonymous: "ould you try to display the suggested application aligned left rather than centered "
yes, now that it's at the top (it used to be at the bottom) it's a lot more distracting; i'll give this a try and see how it goes.
@elcuco: "How did you take the screen capture?"
recordMyDesktop
@hans: "The textbox should IMO always have focus, but you should be able to browse and run a command from the results without tabbing."
yeah, focus and input interaction is on my list of things to look at. probably 4.2 stuff though.
"maybe I should just stick with Katapult."
i'm hoping that katapult will get ported to use Plasma::AbstractRunner so we can share the backends but offer different ways to visualize things.
would be very interesting imho.
@anonymous: "when you typed in Mail and it displayed several alternatives such as Mail (to run Kmail/Mailody I guess) and then it had a few 'mail to *' options. I was wondering if Krunner had queried Strigi for sent mails or were they alternative contacts to mail to?"
those specific returns were entries from the addressbook on my devel system (no real data on it). we do have a xesam runner, though (so .. strigi, beagle, tracker) and if you have the populated they could just have easily come from there.
i hope to have a full, proper nepomuk runner as well in the future.
please be more specific. describe exactly what you want, why you want it, how you use it, etc.
It should be fast, very fast (i.e. you should be extremely conservative about the default amount of bling), and programs should take precedence over all other results (i.e. appear first and appear already while the system's still searching for the other stuff).
Otherwise if instead of 4 mails I have the more usual amount of a few thousand, as soon as I type anything starting with "ma" the system will come to a grinding halt for 5 minutes, probably trash my harddisk through overuse, and then show 20000 "mail to" entries.
Even if it's fast and snappy, all those entries crowd out more useful results. Mails and Songs and all that stuff shouldn't even show up unless it's perfectly clear that you're looking for something like that (e.g. after typing "mail to aaron").
Last but not least I hope you can resize krunner and that change sticks and doesn't break the UI. I've got a 22" display and don't use (can't even, I assume) the rest of the desktop while krunner's up, so why not make it fullscreen? Kickoff for example can't be resized but horizontal resizing is useless. =(
Firefox's Awful Bar does all of that wrong and it's utter crap. Slow, irrelevant results, not enough results visible at one time. Once bitten twice shy, so you're gonna have to convince me with the final result before I'll be able to cheer you on, sorry. =)
A little more of work and I think that krunner could even be the main ALI in KDE4 :)
Great work, really!
One more question (I didn't actually hear the screencast so sorry if it's already present in the voiceover): when you type mail and the contacts appear, can you only type the contact name to make the action appear? It would be great!
Thanks again, Aaron and plasma folks!
Only an hint: it seems to me that gnome-do, with his multi-panel interface, has a new level of flexibility.
I mean, if it's only a launcher, it's ok only by launching apps. But if you put in a calculator, maybe it's because you'd like to add some more power. The single panel interface bounds your choices to what you can do by select and click, you cannot escape - like, having the result by hovering your mouse on the calc icon, that's cheating, isn't it? ;)
I'm not saying "you must use double panel", but if you'd like some extra power you could start by thinking how to simply pass multiple arguments...
BTW, GREAT WORK, it's a great improvemant and a really beautiful app. Beauty is often understimate nowadays, it's great to have you working on krunner. Thanks! ^_^
-Jaba
> please be more specific
I consider the iconographic stuff popping up distracting and annoying. I know what I want, when starting up the minicli/krunner, beforehand. The simple edit box, with the drop down list as in the minicli is all I desire - as unbelievable as it may sound to you delving into the visual playground.
Thanks in advance in case you hear my wish.
Looking great ^_^
Can't wait to get a plugin for Amarok.
I like to jump to tracks by typing =)
Hmm... i'll pay 5$ for that lol
Cheers!
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