Right so before starting this I want to say that it will be more tomorrow morning, its three in the morning and I can't sleep so bear with me for now.

The Issue
We need to set up actions groups, essentially groups working on a segment of the design work and keeping it under check. These groups will be competely 100% open. Nothing will happen in secret, everything will be community driven. The reason for this is that the second step of "Les Grand Scheme" is unfolding, essentially make the design work EVEN more open and community led.

I'm in a talk with some people here on making a System Settings Action Group for example and this is the second Action Group: Polish.

Essentially you all know it, you browse through Plasma widgets/plasmoids and the icons are weird, the descriptions are strange and tiny things don't fit well together. Some icons need changing, some introduction text needs to be rewritten, screenshots taken and more importantly layouts tweaked. This is about going in the deep end of the design pool without the floaters.

Whats an Action Group
An action group will consist of a random assorted group of people, led by one to three people who feel they can keep an eye on things and who feel they can be positive and inclusive, they might be current VDG members or they might be community members. I will make certain that they get a good contact with with the devs in charge and work like a madman making sure that input and design ideas and tweaks are given to the right people. Why will there be people in charge? Because sometimes you need someone to go "ok boys and girls, we've worked on this for a month now - lets let it go and call it done"

How this will work
The fine grained detail has to be hammered out as we go along (don't you just love that btw?) but in not so many words - the people in charge and the people interested will together in this thread talk about issues, anyone can contribute as usual of course. Then we start talking sollutions and ideas for change - now remember this is polish so we don't need to recreate the world, just tweak the bits that are there.
When a good sollution is done we make certain that the devs in charge of the project have heard of the work on it - and then we try to see if there are any issues, from technical to social, to get it implemented. Some plasmoids and applications may be orphaned and no one is there to polish it and work with us on it, then we try to find a new dev for the project.

Now remember, look at the fine details first and foremost. We can't edit the looks of all applications available (I know we all want to, but lets start it easy for once )

What do all of you think? Good idea (action groups) or horrible?

Sounds like a great idea!

Quick question re plasmoids. Will the kde4 plasmoids still be compatible with plasma next / frameworks 5? I know that some are written in python etc, so will that still be allowed? Or is it qml & c++ only?

Also, how will it work with GHNS? Will that be able to only show plasma next compatible or tagged plasmoids?

What is the scope of polish, how big does the problem have to be before it is too big for the group to deal with?

Not to be dissing anybody here but you will not get "a lot of response"....

Best thing..............

GO for it......

and then see what happens....

Kudos...

or.......

no reply.

woodsmoke

Good idea with the action groups! I´m a bit uncertain about the scope of a polish group, because it´s such a wide field. I´d suggest to form some minor action groups (layout, text, icons) who can discuss the issues independently on a thread. And they should coordinate themselves with the other groups about the targets of the polishing intervention.

DonK: Yeah that might be a good idea - perhaps set it up as a drive but with many smaller groups. My question is where should we start? Is there any areas that need polish?

Areas of focus: Plasma Next? That release is coming up soon and it's be nice to focus our efforts there to see some short term results. The beta is available with the hope that folks can report bugs.

Targets: Anything in the workspace: Launcher, taskbar, clock, notification area, theme, panel, etc.

I really like the idea!
I think I could do it now that my finals are over. Who else would be interested in forming a group?

I agree with alake that we should focus on Plasma first. Additionally we should investigate the plasmoids that are shipped by default.
What we should focus on is: padding, text, wrongly used icons (see Uri's post), obnoxious animations and wording. These tasks are relatively simple to report when one got the KDE guidelines at hand.

I won't be joining the group but I have an observation of inconsistencies if you want them:

http://element-6.deviantart.com/art/Dup ... 1401177234

These are all from the current System settings window, on the left end of the top 3 rows is the icon that you can see if you follow the row to the right is repeated several times in various places. The bottom row is where i found several identical icons within the same module.

Having paged dialogues within each module (with the vertical white side bar) means that we must have icons for all of these but having duplicates makes it feel cluttered, less intuitive and makes it harder for a new user to get used to finding their way around.

I'd suggest too that we reserve the 'crossed spanner and screw driver' icon (the one on the 2nd row down) so that it's ONLY ever used on Systems Settings stuff, either to launch System settings, as an icon to indicate that 'click this and you'll be taken to a System settings page' etc. etc. wherever you see that icon it says 'System settings' & nothing else.

alake wrote:Areas of focus: Plasma Next? That release is coming up soon and it's be nice to focus our efforts there to see some short term results. The beta is available with the hope that folks can report bugs.

Targets: Anything in the workspace: Launcher, taskbar, clock, notification area, theme, panel, etc.

I assume Jens had only/mostly Plasma Next in mind when writing his post and just didn't even mention that because Plasma is all he currently thinks about

The front System Settings screen with it's little pop-ups on the Neon 5 ISO is so much better than the current SySe front screen that i did that image with. Without the little icons all over the place it seems much easier to browse through to find what you want, but when you click down into the modules some of the duplicate icons i pointed out are still there.

Progress!
I made my first bug report regarding kickoff today. We also found out that one developer hat forgotten to push some changes that get rid of the month being displayed twice in the calendar.
I'm currently trying to get the widget explorer to work. I can't add nor remove widgets at the moment, lol . What surprised me the most is that this is actually pretty fun, and the devs are keen to help!

Great to hear Sogatori!

The more folks get in on this the better the Plasma Next release will be. If you're not sure if you should submit a bug report, feel free to mention it here first and we can help you decide if it's worth reporting. Otherwise, test away and report bugs to get the visuals polished up!

So my first general submission here. It's a detail that probably needs some design feedback.
When one runs an audio player and then pauses it in the new "Status & Notification" menu, a popup with "audioplayer X paused" will appear directly on top of the controls (which are huge, btw).
Picture:

1. I think this information is a bit redundant as I just pressed pause and probably know it.
2. I don't think it's a good idea to show the notifications on top of these menus (not sure how they are called exactly)



Second thing:
I have a weird bug in Kickoff, which prevents the "m" key from toggling the search function. So when I open up kick of and start to type "menu" I end up with "enu" instead. I asked a developer about it, but he isn't affected. However, I later spoke with another person in #plasma who seems to experience the same.
I'd be nice if someone here could try it out too, if they have Next installed. Right now the evidence is a bit meagre to report a bug.

Sogatori wrote:So my first general submission here. It's a detail that probably needs some design feedback.
When one runs an audio player and then pauses it in the new "Status & Notification" menu, a popup with "audioplayer X paused" will appear directly on top of the controls (which are huge, btw).
Picture:

1. I think this information is a bit redundant as I just pressed pause and probably know it.
2. I don't think it's a good idea to show the notifications on top of these menus (not sure how they are called exactly)

Okay, first of all, throwing a notification when the player pauses doesn't make sense anyway. I press Pause, the music stops playing, the button appearance changes, that's enough feedback. And Amarok doesn't throw a notification when pausing, so I'd suggest filing a bug about that for Clementine. A system notification about something as unimportant as pausing the music player is simply wrong.
When I resume playing by using a global shortcut, it does make sense to display the currently playing track (depending on how long I've paused, I may have forgotten which track was playing), but the notification does not make sense when I see the track in the popup anyway. Actually, I don't need any notification for actions I've triggered on the player's main UI either. The HIG says "Use a notification to inform about a non-critical problem that is not directly relevant to the user's current task." When I'm interacting with the music player's main UI, then that definitely is my main task.

So you've spotted a general problem with media player notifications here which should be fixed. However, implementing a system that prevents notifications about media play from being shown when they're triggered from either the main UI or the Plasma popup might be too complex for a simple polishing fix.

Actually, notifications are a general topic which we should talk about in further detail. Here, Celeste Lyn Paul (former leader of the KDE usability group) can help a lot here because she has written her dissertation about desktop notifications.