Hi,
I'm Aleix Pol and I'm Muon maintainer, among other things.

I've recently finished doing the dumb-porting of Muon to KF5 and I'm looking into iterating it over again. One of the things we could use is some visual design touch, and I here you're all about that.

As an introduction to the project, here's a little video of what we've been doing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO9xrnQ7sDQ

The idea of the project is to display the resources our users have, in an easy and comprehensive way. For the moment we support package managers, but also different artwork and content providers, so we actually can consider it the way to a pull the contents that will define the features the user has. This is important because it leverages the weight of having to provide everything installed to the user by letting him choose what she wants.

So far it's the default Kubuntu software center, and it should start to be adopted by other distributions soon enough, namely Chakra and Debian at least. Others will come soon as well.

Looking forward to your thoughts.

Ok so here is how i would do it:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo0.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo1.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo2.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo3.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo4.jpg
It's just the "product" page. If You find one of them interesting i'll try to think about the rest. I personally like the muo0.

EraX wrote:Ok so here is how i would do it:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo0.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo1.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo2.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo3.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo4.jpg
It's just the "product" page. If You find one of them interesting i'll try to think about the rest. I personally like the muo0.

I really like the first two

EraX! Did I ever mention that you rock?! Fantastic proposals there. I'm partial to muo0 and muo1 myself. They're great uses of the color palette to create space and meaning. Just excellent!

Hi EraX!
First of all, thanks for the work, I really like it.

Have you considered taking a go at the main screen? This one is the one that needs the most love as it hasn't been iterated since the first release.
Also could you give the project a try? The main navigation actions (in the toolbar currently) are not taken into account in your mockups.

Looking forward to the progress!

muo0 is lovely. The best Erax!

Thx

apol wrote:Hi EraX!
First of all, thanks for the work, I really like it.

Have you considered taking a go at the main screen? This one is the one that needs the most love as it hasn't been iterated since the first release.

Ok give me some time and i'll try to come up with something.

apol wrote:Also could you give the project a try? The main navigation actions (in the toolbar currently) are not taken into account in your mockups.

Looking forward to the progress!

Do you mean the Discover/Installed/Sources ?

EraX wrote:Thx

apol wrote:Hi EraX!
First of all, thanks for the work, I really like it.

Have you considered taking a go at the main screen? This one is the one that needs the most love as it hasn't been iterated since the first release.

Ok give me some time and i'll try to come up with something.

apol wrote:Also could you give the project a try? The main navigation actions (in the toolbar currently) are not taken into account in your mockups.

Looking forward to the progress!

Do you mean the Discover/Installed/Sources ?

Yes. Also the way categories are displayed can be iterated as well.

EraX wrote:Ok so here is how i would do it:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo0.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo1.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo2.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo3.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo4.jpg
It's just the "product" page. If You find one of them interesting i'll try to think about the rest. I personally like the muo0.

muo0 is simply gorgeous.

So maybe something like this for the main screen?
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/633 ... oHome0.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/633 ... oHome1.jpg
Empty boxes are for images.

These designs, especially muo0 are really great! I personally would prefer MuoHome0, I like bright interfaces

When I saw the status messages, something came on my mind:
Using current Muon Discover:

1. Install something
2. Close the program
3. Restart Muon Discover
=> No status

It's clear for users, with knowledge how APT works that it runs in background, but a unexperienced user would be confused, thinking, something went wrong.
Solutions may be:

1. If something is running, ask if the user closes the window
2. Alternative/Used if closed: A tray icon, indicating, something is working. Clicking on this icon results in showing Muon Discover.

Also: If you change software sources, 'nothing' happens, because everything runs in background. This should be indicated, as well.

rumangerst wrote:These designs, especially muo0 are really great! I personally would prefer MuoHome0, I like bright interfaces

The final UI will surely respect the user's selected color scheme. The question is of whether it uses the color scheme normally or inverts colors in order to appear dark in a bright color scheme. I think there has to be a good argument for inverting the scheme colors for a specific application, because users expect applications to simply respect the color scheme they chose.

When I saw the status messages, something came on my mind:
Using current Muon Discover:

1. Install something
2. Close the program
3. Restart Muon Discover
=> No status

It's clear for users, with knowledge how APT works that it runs in background, but a unexperienced user would be confused, thinking, something went wrong.
Solutions may be:

1. If something is running, ask if the user closes the window
2. Alternative/Used if closed: A tray icon, indicating, something is working. Clicking on this icon results in showing Muon Discover.

Also: If you change software sources, 'nothing' happens, because everything runs in background. This should be indicated, as well.

Good catch! Users have to be informed about things running in the background.

colomar wrote:The final UI will surely respect the user's selected color scheme. The question is of whether it uses the color scheme normally or inverts colors in order to appear dark in a bright color scheme. I think there has to be a good argument for inverting the scheme colors for a specific application, because users expect applications to simply respect the color scheme they chose.

For version 0 and 1 of both muo and muohome are meant to use the color scheme normally. No color inverting no hard coded values everything from the default color plate.
As for the rest i was just experimenting.

One of the things we tried with the current interface is that it would look like a browser. That's why we get the toolbar+search bar on top and the downloads at the bottom, chromium-style.

On your mockups I fear a bit that the navigation hasn't matured much, maybe you can elaborate on those?
Also it looks a bit cramped, at least in comparison to what we did so far (not necessarily bad). In older versions I had the cover switch for the banners, rather than having just the one like we do currently and we removed it because it ended up being a lot of visual noise. I can give it a go on a similar setup and we can see how it feels though.

Thanks!

EraX wrote:Ok so here is how i would do it:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo0.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo1.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo2.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo3.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63396655/muo4.jpg
It's just the "product" page. If You find one of them interesting i'll try to think about the rest. I personally like the muo0.

Just to repeat what everyone already said: This looks marvellous. Since everyone voices his support for muo0, I want to 'cast my vote' for muo1. I like it better when the 'Details' panel is under the navigation bar, since it belongs to the program shown in the right panel and depends on the selection made in the navigation bar. Especially when e.g browsing categories, it is probably not even visible or not filled with information, while the navigation bar is already visible. So it would IMHO look strange to have it either sit there empty or have it pop in and move the navigation bar (which could otherwise be in a fixed position).