Sorry again, I saw the edit button too late. Please start reading from the first reply on.

Oh sorry, something has screwed up the posting. Here it is again shortened to what it was meant:

I have compiled and tried the recent KDE4.4/trunk to play around with the new features. There I came across the new add-widget dialog of a panel. Besides some bugs that I have reported I think about the general usability of the new dialog. Where do you see the advantages of the new dialog?

I see the following advantages of the old dialog (or disadvantages of the new dialog):

1) A vertical list IMHO is much more userfriendly. The user is used to scroll things vertically. If e.g. a webpage has to be scrolled horizontally this feels really bad. Maybe it is interesting and looking different, but it is not a good choice.

2) Also the new dialog is missing a scroll bar. Ok, you can scroll by using the mouse wheel, but scrolling without a scroll bar again is user unfriendly. A scroll bar is better to handle, a user is used to it, and you see the current position in the scrolled content.

3) A vertical list can much better contain long text strings. The new dialog is only looking good if widgets have short names. Also there is no space for a longer description of the widget. This IMHO does fit much better in the old style list dialog.

4) The new dialog has to be layoutet in two ways: Horizontally for horizontal panels and vertically for vertical panels. This is not only much more complicated for the designer and developer, but also this means there are two view styles for the user who have to "learn" them both. The old widget list was the same for both kind of panels.

5) The new dialog does not have a good place for the category tabs for a vertical panel. If there are presented one below the other you loose much space that otherwise could be used to display widget icons. Currently the text font is very small for this vertically stacked tabs. People with bad eyes will have a problem with this. So I cannot call this layout barrier-free.

6) The new add widget dialog has the problem that the categories are presented side by side in the horizontal layout and do not fit onto the screen. So you have to scroll this list to see all categories. This is very bad. In the old style you had the popup menu were all categories could be seen at a glance. Also it is IMHO not very intuitivly to see that you can scroll the category tabs.

So where is the advantage of the new dialog style? If I could vote for one of the dialogs I clearly would vote for the old style. What is your opinion?

The old style dialog:
http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.2/sc ... widget.png

The new style dialog:
http://bugsfiles.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=38340

Oh, by googling for a screenshot of the new dialog I found that I am not allone with my opinion:
viewtopic.php?f=67&t=82971
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209064

Oh, by googling for a screenshot of the new dialog I found that I am not allone with my opinion:
viewtopic.php?f=67&t=82971
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209064