March 2011 wrap-up

written on Monday, April 4, 2011

4th of April, time for March wrap-up...

What happened in March?

Gwenview compare mode

In last month wrap-up, I presented my work on Gwenview compare mode, but was not satisfied with the user interface for the compare mode: I thought it was too busy. I simplified it by getting rid of the concept of best-candidate, instead you just select more than one (and up to 6) documents and Gwenview will show them side by side. The only user interface specific to compare-mode is a small HUD at the bottom of the document views, allowing you to either deselect the document or trash it.

After a few improvements like adding a synchronize feature, +/- select buttons for items in the thumbnail bar and highlighting of the current item in the thumbnail bar, I decided it was good enough to be merged to master. There are still a few adjustments I want to do, but nothing too intrusive.

Compare two images

Or go crazy and compare 6 of them... (I hope you have a big screen!)

Compare mode works in fullscreen too

Communication

Spent some time preparing my slides for the two presentations I gave at the KDE 4.6 Release Party organized by the Toulibre association in Toulouse. The event was really great, a warm thank-you to Toulibre. I think both presentations went rather well, except for some hiccup while demonstrating Gwenview Importer. Presentations have been recorded, videos as well as slides should be online soon.

I also wrote a new post for my series on common UI errors in KDE applications: Being GNOME friendly. It received a mixed reception, but given the subject, that was to be expected.

Other contributions

Since I took KDE Partition Manager as an example of margins being wrong in my UI errors article, I tried to make up for pointing fingers by patching the problem. Patch has been accepted. Here is a montage showing the space savings:

Note that you should also get a bit more usable space when using Oxygen theme, even if it reduces the effects of double-margins.

I also resumed my use of RSIBreak, "thanks" to the return of my left wrist pain. This led me to port it from QSystemTrayIcon to KStatusNotifierItem. Patch is in, you can now enjoy nicer tooltips and mouse-over effects (and even get a fully functional RSIBreak if, like me, you find yourself running Unity 2D in a nested session from within a KDE session, but I guess it's not a common situation...)

What's planned for April?

For April I'd like to make the latest adjustments to Gwenview compare mode and maybe start working on some metadata-related bugs... I am not too sure yet, we'll see. I am also attending KDE UX Sprint in Berlin, which I am looking forward to. Who knows what will come out of it?

So, not much planned, but that does not mean I plan to slack! Don't worry, your contributions will be put into good use :)

This entry was tagged Gwenview, KDE and fsday