Improve navigation on Kickoff's Applications page
Closed, WontfixPublic

Description

Kickoff's Applications page suffers from a few usability-related deficiencies:

  • Click-based navigation makes it very slow and annoying to find an app by category: click category, click back, click on another category, click back again, ad nauseam
  • No ability to see all apps; limited to Category-based view only
  • Poor use of space; most of the view at any given time is whitespace. Feels wasteful

I'd like to propose that we overhaul this page for greater usability and an improved overall user experience. Here are two exceptionally crude mockups illustrating generally what I'm envisioning, followed by a textual explanation:

  • The page can switch between category-based navigation and a flat alphabetical list (and remember the last-used view mode)
  • For the Categories view, adopt the hover-based category browser used in Application Dashboard and SimpleMenu, which is really pleasant, easy to use, and fast for experts. It's also the same UI that's used by many other popular Linux launcher menus, such as XFCE's Whisker Menu and Linux Mint's mintmenu.
  • Use square icon tiles instead of horizontal list entries. This increases visual density and allows the display of many more apps at once. It also does a better job of highlighting pretty app icons!
  • Badge recently-installed apps, per T7913: Make it really obvious where newly-installed apps can be found
ndavis added a subscriber: ndavis.Apr 5 2019, 11:21 PM

This new Applications tab is basically a clone of SimpleMenu, XFCE's Whisker menu, or Excalibur Menu: https://store.kde.org/p/1172867/

mart added a subscriber: mart.Oct 23 2019, 1:52 PM

this kinda reminds me the first kde thing i did almost 15 years ago, which was a launcher for KDE3 (note the aestetics is very... 15 years ago;)


(consider the center and right column, not the left)
Root category on that middle column that would become the left column, and a right column with categories flattened (but still one level of categories used as sections)

like back then, i still strongly prefer lists over icon grids

ngraham moved this task from Backlog/Planned to Postponed on the VDG board.Dec 28 2019, 8:43 PM
ngraham closed this task as Wontfix.
ngraham claimed this task.

We're going to move forward with T12192 instead.

ngraham moved this task from To Do to Abandoned on the Plasma board.Dec 28 2019, 8:44 PM