pedrorodriguez wrote:The mockups are very nice. Personally I find horizontal navigation difficult. I remember the frustration with the old horizontal add widgets/activities bar. I like the idea with widgets and "apps", but I would have a vertical list on the left (you could still cycle through the elements in the submenu with left/right arrows) and widgets on the right. That way it would also be more consistent with the browse music/videos screens IMO.

It's great to see designs for PMC, and hopefully plasma active will get some love at some point.

Great work

I think we kept coming back to horizontal navigation because after a fairly lengthy pro/con list there were a few benefits to the horizontal 2-level navigation approach. We could have also done the 2-level approach vertically, but it would have been less space efficient. In the end we made some pro/con lists and Bhushan favoured the horizontal version. I did poke him about making the system flexible enough to allow a vertical layout to be an alternative - but for now I think he wants to focus on getting the software usable before having multiple home-screen layouts.

Home Screen (showing edit button)

This is just showing what might be an 'edit widgets' button which would open up widget config.


The idea here is that the navigation bar (or any playback panels) would slide out, and you would get this as the widget configuration UI. The "+" symbols would open an add widget screen, and the widget container would expand (as it does now) to show the editing controls. Since widgets are locked in height and rotation we only need to worry about width and position. Minimum width would be according to the widget size hint, and max width would be the screen width.


The widget addition UI could simply be a clone of things like the media browse UI to lighten work required. If other views are added maybe they could just be allowed in a similar way as XBMC (which uses a generic view structure approach)

Kver wrote:

pedrorodriguez wrote:I think we kept coming back to horizontal navigation because after a fairly lengthy pro/con list there were a few benefits to the horizontal 2-level navigation approach. We could have also done the 2-level approach vertically, but it would have been less space efficient. In the end we made some pro/con lists and Bhushan favoured the horizontal version. I did poke him about making the system flexible enough to allow a vertical layout to be an alternative - but for now I think he wants to focus on getting the software usable before having multiple home-screen layouts.

They look better and better. if the advantages of the horizontal layout outweigh the disadvantages, we can commit to this (but really commit:p) and start it.

So work-unit wise, there are 2 separate things:
the layout of PMC itself, (pretty much the central strip) and the layout of the containment, those two things will be very independent from each other.

so bhushan can start with them

Kver wrote:

pedrorodriguez wrote:I think we kept coming back to horizontal navigation because after a fairly lengthy pro/con list there were a few benefits to the horizontal 2-level navigation approach. We could have also done the 2-level approach vertically, but it would have been less space efficient. In the end we made some pro/con lists and Bhushan favoured the horizontal version. I did poke him about making the system flexible enough to allow a vertical layout to be an alternative - but for now I think he wants to focus on getting the software usable before having multiple home-screen layouts.

They look better and better. if the advantages of the horizontal layout outweigh the disadvantages, we can commit to this (but really commit:p) and start it.

So work-unit wise, there are 2 separate things:
the layout of PMC itself, (pretty much the central strip) and the layout of the containment, those two things will be very independent from each other.

so Bhushan can start with them

+1 from me!