Re: Application browsing design

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Hi!

While I think the current design is already pretty good, I believe we
could improve the way these menus work with the mouse pointer. First, as
Mike reported in a bug, it feels more natural and efficient to activate
menus on hover, and not on click. I don't believe that will be
confusing, and that will make it much quicker to browse apps.

The same principle should be applied to pages. Clicking on page numbers
or on "next" buttons is not nice (I guess that's a temporary design).
Just like on the mockups, there should be scroll bars so that mouse
wheels and touchpads allow you to do this easily. Then the question is:
how do you sroll apps when there are several columns? Maybe the scroll
bar could be horizontal, and columns would move left-right. That's the
only simple solution I can see.

I also believe that simple click is enough to start an app. There's no
need to reserve the single click for selecting an entry, since there's
no action that requires selecting an item. Drag and drop would still
work with single click launch. We could adopt KDE 4's method to
introduce more actions on an app: hover on an entry, and little
icons/buttons show up in the corners. That would fit in your proposal to
pin an app by clicking on a little star icon. Another icon like that
could start an app in the active workspace without going out of the
overlay, for example.


About different layouts, I can't decide between the one you developed in
the wiki, and the option 3, which would dedicate the first column to
recent apps, show categories in the second one, and then applications in
the last. With a good scrolling, I guess the latter could be nice too.
Though, if we find a very cool way of switching between recent apps and
categories, your proposal can really win...

Hope this helps (a little)!