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while in icon mode the entries in kickoff become icons and not vertical list

finding an icon becomes more of 'spot a graphic' and less 'find an item' task

learning the location of a frequently used item becomes easier

space is used more efficiently so less scrolling is needed

Looks nice to me, although probably best implemented separately as a new Application Launcher however.

wow! excellent idea

Reminds me of my Zetta menu. :P



(I should really redo the mockup someday - the fonts are horrible).

Mr. Lancelot (ivan) brough up a very important point regarding icon view:

ivan wrote:The only thing I see that could be a problem is the icon mode. It is all well when you have 3 icons per row and not many rows per section, but in the games.png, you could easily lose yourself. As you said, you can count up to 20 visible applications, but that number is too large. When the number of items is greater than 5-7, the human brain starts the serial-search mode - it doesn't *see* all items at once, it starts going from one to another until it finds what it searches for. Why do you think that new KDE4 applications have uncluttered their toolbars compared to the KDE3 ones.

Hans wrote:

Seems you and jrick share the same opinion regarding the icon view. I didn't know about the "serial search mode" of the brain, very interesting. Seems i still have much to learn.

My inspiration for the icon view was, to no one's surprise, Dolphin or filemanagers in general. For example, I have 105 files in my download directory . Even when I show them all at once by maximizing the window, I can quickly find a specific picture (with previews shown). My brain skips the text (i.e., the filenames) and only scans the previews - or maybe I should say "skim", as that's closer to what I do.

I thought the problem with games.png was that the "games" all share the same icon, and the badly rendered fonts take some of your attention.

ivan wrote:As for the images, and Dophin, it is true. But unfortunately not all applications can be easily recognized only by the icon, so users would every now and then have to read the titles, and there lies the problem. So, the icon view is perfect for - well icons - when the items can be easily recognized by their respective image representations, and the list/details view is for name recognition.

If Zetta could remember the user choices for different application categories - whether to show them as list or as icons, i think it would fix this issue. (although that approach has its disadvantages - mainly the inconsistency)

That's why I included a list view (a la Kickoff) in Zetta.

Just some food for thought. By the way, how do you go back in icon view? The usual Kickoff back button?

i actually like icon view cause it calls to 'see it' while vertical list calls for 'search for it'

the causes i can see are

geometry - intuition works better when stuff is scattered across an area. in reality objects we want to use are scattered in 3D around us (2D in projection) and not placed in a single line. in icon view the geometry is square field

clear space - icon view allows better distribution of clear space around objects. this makes everything look less dense

dominance of graphics over text - in icon view text is a small word under large icon. in column view there is wide text column (which is also closer to the center of the widget / of the screen) alongside thin icon column

you can go back by either

the kickoff back arrow
click or right click in the empty space
a specal icon within the icon view (1st one) (like the .. folder)
or the cascading tooltips from folder view can be used

Yes, people brain works best with 5-7 items at once.

Despite that, I think, that i very rare cases user really uses more than 5-10 apps from same category. I mean, really, Once a month is not regular, so you could get used to look for that "unpopular" app in the bottom of the list.

But the best would be, if kickoff could monitor and sort apps by popularity and frequency of use. So yuou ost favorite apps would be on top. And to "scan" top 2 lines, its very easy.

#lukas thats a great suggestion

sort icons by
most frequently used
most recently used

ash wrote:#lukas thats a great suggestion

sort icons by
most frequently used
most recently used

Combine them too, first 4 slots for most frequently used, next 2 for most recently used, rest sort by title.