Hi guys,

we did initial port of print-manager to KF5 ~2 months ago and I would like to finally redesign the applet to make it look similar to the rest of Plasma 5 applets. I think that the functionality should stay as it is, which means when you open the applet it should list all available printers and when you pickup any particular printer it should somehow expand and show active/all tasks (depends on the configuration).

The current design of the applet:


I'm looking forward to read your ideas

To be honest: I'd just design it as similar to the Device Notifier as possible. It's doing pretty much the same (list of things which you can expand to see actions), so it should follow the same design.

Do all printers always use the same icon, or does it depend on the type of printer? If they're all the same, they are redundant and should not be shown. If they can be different, they can be useful for quick visual identification.

What about this?

Added device notifier applet just for comparison.

colomar wrote:Do all printers always use the same icon, or does it depend on the type of printer? If they're all the same, they are redundant and should not be shown. If they can be different, they can be useful for quick visual identification.

Nope, they can have up to 3 types of icon (printer, laser-printer, scanner).

jgrulich wrote:What about this?

I like it. Plain and simple layout, with all needed information.
I guess the label below the printer's name shows the document's name along with its owner when not idle. Something like "Printing document.odt for jgrulich".

Added more improvements:
1) Search bar (idea from Martin Gräßlin) + configure button which opens KCM for printers configuration
2) Default printer is at the top

Heiko Tietze wrote:I guess the label below the printer's name shows the document's name along with its owner when not idle. Something like "Printing document.odt for jgrulich".

Actually the label shows the current status like "Connecting to printer", no information about which document is being printed, but we can add one more label or put this information somewhere.

The search bar is nice, but it is adding complexity for people who have only a few printers. How about making it dynamic ? For instance, if there are 3 printers or less, it is not shown. With 4 or more, it can become very handy and it is displayed.

I think it would be good if the number of pending print jobs for each printer is shown directly in the applet, so users don't have to open each print queue to know if it is empty. Maybe it could be a shown in the "Open print queue" button itself, e.g.:

Open print queue
Empty

or

Open print queue
3 jobs

Regarding the search field, another possibility would be to only show it once the user starts typing, like in kickoff.

how does it look when the user print a document? the same linke the notifier. a progress bar and on button the filename a how much pages are printed. the pause button is always shown also when the printer is idle.

smls wrote:I think it would be good if the number of pending print jobs for each printer is shown directly in the applet, so users don't have to open each print queue to know if it is empty. Maybe it could be a shown in the "Open print queue" button itself, e.g.:

Open print queue
Empty

or

Open print queue
3 jobs

Regarding the search field, another possibility would be to only show it once the user starts typing, like in kickoff.

I really like your both ideas. Regarding the search field, do you mean it would popup when you type something or like in kickoff have some placeholder text and when you type something it would switch the text to a search field?

andreas_k wrote:how does it look when the user print a document? the same linke the notifier. a progress bar and on button the filename a how much pages are printed. the pause button is always shown also when the printer is idle.

There is no progress bar or notification, but we can add a busy indicator somewhere when any printer is doing some action, maybe we can put this information instead of the search field as placeholder text, something like "Printing document.odt, pages 3/5". The pause button is available all the time, because you can pause the printer even if there is no active job. The only use case for this is probably when you want to print many documents at once and you just put all of them to the print queue and when you are done you can unpause it and print everything together.

which icon size for the printer/scanner, do you use because there is no print icon in the breeze theme. so this icons would be needed (in the right size).

andreas_k wrote:which icon size for the printer/scanner, do you use because there is no print icon in the breeze theme. so this icons would be needed (in the right size).

I use units.iconSizes.medium in QML, not sure which size it is, whether 24 or bigger, but if you are going to create icons for this applet, there are 3 types of icon ( printer, scanner, printer-laser - used for not colored printers).

I added info about number of jobs below the "Open print queue" button and made the search bar hidden if there are just few printers.

jgrulich wrote:Regarding the search field, another possibility would be to only show it once the user starts typing, like in kickoff.

I really like your both ideas. Regarding the search field, do you mean it would popup when you type something or like in kickoff have some placeholder text and when you type something it would switch the text to a search field?[/quote]

Nope, the search pattern HIG says "If a Plasmoid or Plasma dialog has a filter capability, always use a static filter since there is no menu to show or hide it." and it does that for a reason. The fact that Kickoff doesn't adhere to the HIG has already caused us quite some negative feedback and we don't want to repeat that with any other Plasmoid.

AGuiFR's idea makes perfect sense, however:

AGuiFr wrote:The search bar is nice, but it is adding complexity for people who have only a few printers. How about making it dynamic ? For instance, if there are 3 printers or less, it is not shown. With 4 or more, it can become very handy and it is displayed.

This would be quite annoying if printers appeared and vanished often and the search field would appear and vanish along with them, but that's rarely the case.

Usually we have let's say three kinds of users:

1. Home users with probably the majority only having one printer, some more with maybe two or three in the house. They won't ever need to search for their printer in the list.
2. Users in small organizations. They'll have maybe around five printers. Still no need for a search.
3. Users in large corporate networks where they can access maybe a few dozen printers. For them, a search field would be an awesome feature.

Yes, people may use their computer both at home and at work. But even those won't need the search field to find one out of three printers at home.
So why not indeed make a rule that, for example if there are more printers availoable than fit in the visible list, show a search field?

colomar wrote:Yes, people may use their computer both at home and at work. But even those won't need the search field to find one out of three printers at home.
So why not indeed make a rule that, for example if there are more printers availoable than fit in the visible list, show a search field?

That's exactly how I have it implemented, I check if the content of the view is bigger than the visible part (which also means that the scroll bar is visible), if it's bigger, I make the search field visible.

jgrulich wrote:That's exactly how I have it implemented, I check if the content of the view is bigger than the visible part (which also means that the scroll bar is visible), if it's bigger, I make the search field visible.

Awesome! Definitely a +1 from me, then!