Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Next Generation KDE Plasma Notifications

blog.broulik.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 108 posts

Re: Next Generation KDE Plasma Notifications

#51

Post by asark »

Crinus wrote: post #49
magduf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is the real tragedy of KDE, and it's been like this forever: technically, it's fantastic, but the design and polish are really lacking. Instead, all the people good at visual design are working on Gnome, which has technical underpinnings that are crap by comparison.

GNOME does terrible waste of screen real estate so if those "people good at visual design" are responsible for that, i'd rather them stay in GNOME instead of infecting other desktop environments.

Design quality for a UI, ordered easiest to hardest:

1) Information dense

2) Looks good in screenshots

3) Information dense and easy to use

4) Information dense and easy to use and looks good in screenshots

An awful lot of designers stop at 2 because a 4 is way harder to achieve, yet a 2's pretty easy to sell (to "stakeholders"). The result is at least sometimes (sometimes) better than a 1. They may also drop a 3 to a 2, though, and it's really hard to later turn a 2 into a 3 (since it's "uglier", so harder to sell) and a 2 is so different in character from a 4 that it can't even really be considered progress toward it (a 3 might be).

Re: Next Generation KDE Plasma Notifications

#52

Post by rexpop »

brmgb wrote: post #22
sergiomattei wrote: post #4

I can't be the only one that dislikes KDE's typography. I see that notification pane and aside from color, nothing gives it typographical hierarchy. It just looks odd to me.

You are not alone. Typography is questionable but the worst parts are padding and alignment. I have to apologize in advance because it's going to sound like a harsh comment and I know this is volunteer work. I really think that KDE is technically very good. The amount of basic design mistakes however is just unbearable as far as I am concerned. I mean, let's take a look at this improved notification panel. The closin…

What are your design bonafides? It's easy to apply naive heuristics to visual design, but usability is key, and maybe you just don't recognize it.

Re: Next Generation KDE Plasma Notifications

#53

Post by shrimp_emoji »

sk0g wrote: post #6

Does it solve the infinite appending issue though? Basically, every Slack message would append to the same notification, so after 4-5 notifications, I'd just see old ones and a ... line, making the notifications useless. This also went for the update centre, etc. Also when notifications decide to just stay on screen indefinitely because of... Reasons.

>infinite appending issue though?

I've never experienced this. Particularly, I don't experience this with Discord, and Discord is to Slack what a bee is to an ant, which is why I juxtapose it. (And I would ask if it might be something on the Slack side, but you say it happens with everything.)

>Also when notifications decide to just stay on screen indefinitely

Never had this either.

Might have been bugs. If you're on Ubuntu or another point release distro, those kinds of bugs also stick around, IME, because your DE version stays stagnant and the bugs are only fixed in subsequent versions.

Re: Next Generation KDE Plasma Notifications

#54

Post by noahadavis »

solarkraft wrote: post #25
tylerjwilk00 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has always been the problem with KDE and the reason I can not switch. KDE UI never gets Typography, spacing/padding, or alignment correct. It's a shame because they are so close on most other criteria.

I agree. That said I switched to KDE a few weeks ago and turned into a fan boy during the configuration process. I'm very happy with my current configuration (probably a mix of it actually being good and the Ikea effect). I love that you can just configure almost anything almost exactly to your liking with not all that much effort. I'm not a huge fan of the default configuration, but the ability to completely change…

You're correct that KDE's design group isn't organized from the top down. While that might be a problem for a company, I think it's actually a good thing for a community of volunteers because communities need to grow. Everyone has their own lives outside of the work they do for KDE, so it's important that the work load is spread across many people. Anyone can start start designing for KDE, you just need to talk to other KDE designers and submit patches.

I am a fairly new KDE designer who started contributing icons in the spring of 2018 because it was easy and fun.

Re: Next Generation KDE Plasma Notifications

#55

Post by inetknght »

TheCoreh wrote: post #50
inetknght wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of horizontal padding? What padding do you want? There's clear whitespace between everything. I for one definitely like and want more compact information. I definitely do not like the trend for making information more sparse. Leave that for your blog; business runs on information.

Information density is not hampered by the presence of proper negative space, on the contrary, using the right amount of negative space actually allows for very information dense layouts to still be readable. A good example is a traditional paper phone book

What you define to be proper is likely not what I define to be proper. It's certainly a context-sensitive opinion.

The amount and location depends on what you want to do. Yes, just like a phone book, it needs whitespace. A notification window is not a paper phone book though. A paper phone book typically has a lot less whitespace than we're discussing here, so I'm not even sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing or trying to point something else out.

Re: Next Generation KDE Plasma Notifications

#56

Post by inetknght »

hadrien01 wrote: post #13
fooqux wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I tried, you couldn't type direct paths into the fileselector or the file browser, basically requiring that you mouse your way around. I found that extremely aggravating and went back to KDE almost immediately.

Ctrl+L has always worked for me, it highlights the path field.

Having a key sequence is fine. Remembering the key sequence is annoying. Every OS and UI wants to have it different. Modern OSes even get rid of hints and text so people don't even know that a key sequence is available.

Re: Next Generation KDE Plasma Notifications

#57

Post by notatoad »

inetknght wrote: post #39
funkiee wrote: post #16

Is lack of horizontal padding part of the KDE aesthetic?

Lack of horizontal padding? What padding do you want? There's clear whitespace between everything. I for one definitely like and want more compact information. I definitely do not like the trend for making information more sparse. Leave that for your blog; business runs on information.

The most egregious example that stood out to me here is the x-padding between the edge of the notification panel and any text inside the panel is less than the padding between the notification title and the text below it.

The problem isn't that they need more padding, it's that their padding makes no sense. If they made a design decision to have tight padding that would be one thing, but they've got a horizontal layout with tight padding in the horizontal direction and wide padding in the vertical.

here's a really quick-and-dirty edit to even out the padding around each text block to be equal to the line height, which actually tightens up the total density by correcting the too-high line height in the notification text: https://imgur.com/uVcY6Sw

Re: Next Generation KDE Plasma Notifications

#58

Post by ru999gol »

every few weeks KDE forgets all my panels because of connecting/disconnecting external displays and KDE having horrible multi display support. KDE is so full of bugs like that its really frustrating, like the task manager forgetting which screen they are on or shift getting stuck when connecting an external keyword, etc. etc. But I've made my peace with all the bugs being a fact of life, using it for 8+ years.

Re: Next Generation KDE Plasma Notifications

#59

Post by buovjaga »

brmgb wrote: post #22
sergiomattei wrote: post #4

I can't be the only one that dislikes KDE's typography. I see that notification pane and aside from color, nothing gives it typographical hierarchy. It just looks odd to me.

You are not alone. Typography is questionable but the worst parts are padding and alignment. I have to apologize in advance because it's going to sound like a harsh comment and I know this is volunteer work. I really think that KDE is technically very good. The amount of basic design mistakes however is just unbearable as far as I am concerned. I mean, let's take a look at this improved notification panel. The closin…

There already is a very active design team: https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/design

For progress in polishing stuff (not only visual), see the blog https://pointieststick.com/ for weekly updates.

Re: Next Generation KDE Plasma Notifications

#60

Post by genghizkhan »

inetknght wrote: post #39
funkiee wrote: post #16

Is lack of horizontal padding part of the KDE aesthetic?

Lack of horizontal padding? What padding do you want? There's clear whitespace between everything. I for one definitely like and want more compact information. I definitely do not like the trend for making information more sparse. Leave that for your blog; business runs on information.

I think the gp means the left edge of the notification and the starting of the text.
Post reply on HN