Hi all and happy holidays.
Been a KDE user for two years and one of those who is frantically following the KDE releases.

While I was using kickoff application launcher, I realized that in the process of launching a new application the user (me) is more focusing on the app launcher and does not care of the entire real estate of the screen.

What about a plasma dashboard like launcher which utilizes the entire screen?
- When activated (Classically a button as usual or activated when the mouse pointer is taken to a particular corner of the screen or a keyboard short cut).

- And a dashboard like layer covers the screen and the menu is displayed as bubbles distributed throughout the screen.

- When a mouse pointer is hovered over a menu item, its contents come up as sub-bubbles around the main bubble.

Escape/Launching an app or clicking on a blank space makes the dashboard-launcher go away

What do you guys think? I know a mockup would be nice, but a lower primate can draw better than me.

Sounds sort-of like the Ubuntu Netbook Remix menu[url=http://www.canonical.com/files/video/netbook-screencast.mp4]
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Except less brown. Not sure about the bubbles though. Could be too cartoony for KDE4, and might not flow very well. Depends on how its implemented though...

This actually looks good. Gotta try it out. But again this looks too much like a menu. The bubbles was a bad idea anyway. But I was trying to think of an alternate to menus.

Well, my impression is, in KDE4, menus are supposed to be streamlined, if not replaced by setting up a semantic deskop. Essentially, what it seems like you're looking for is what the plasma desktop/dashboard is itself striving towards. The idea is to make information - whether it be applications, documents, rss feeds, system data... - accessible in an intuitive, context sensitive way. If you want a "dashboard" specific for applications, you would create an activity called "Applications".

However, this might be too closed. Lets say, for example, you edit videos. You could create an activity with launchers for your video editing software (or maybe read-only template files) and you'd have your files organized by context - such as project - in folder views. You would also have other relevant information and tools, such as an RSS feed with video editing tips, links to tutorials, emails related to your current video editing projects, and a pair of googly-eyes for... well, because everyone likes googly-eyes.

This functionality isn't all that apparent at the moment. NEPOMUK, a metadata project that works to provide the technology for a semantic desktop, needs to see more integration into the work-flow. Until then, menus probably won't change very much.

There is one menu of note that plans to use metadata to make using a menu fit better into your work flow. I'm not convinced with it myself, but its called raptor. It is a work in progress (though I haven't seen much of that for a while. The latest news is from March).

Exactly what I was trying to communicate. I see this potential in KDE4 and plasma. I have been closely following the development of KDE4 right from the start. I was one of the few people who were not appalled when they decided to remove the desktop icons as I exactly knew where they were trying to go with the concept. Every month, I checkout raptor just to see where they are heading.

I hate the way OSX launches applications and the menu system can be quiet painful if you have a lot of application groups. Do not even get me started on the M$ way which has no concept of application groups which makes it a lot more painful. GNOME does not have enough momentum to keep me excited about that project.

I just do not want the innovation in KDE4 to stop. Hopefully this year will see me starting to contribute code into the project.

This could easily be done with a Desktop Activity, which provides a menu. An activity could then be mapped to the "Menu" button, which would switch and pull it up.

bcooksley wrote:This could easily be done with a Desktop Activity, which provides a menu. An activity could then be mapped to the "Menu" button, which would switch and pull it up.

Yes, but are there interfaces to create/launch/modify activities from plasmoids/widgets?

Activities are just Plasmoids themselves, so they should be able to communicate with each other over D-Bus if no inbuilt method exists.