KDE Multimedia Sprint QuickSand, day 1
For those who know what QuickSand is you may wonder "What is the relationship between QuickSand and Multimedia/Edu?" the answer to that question is quick and short, none :p but it is what I did today.
What is QuickSand?
QuickSand is an alternative interface for KRunner, it is integrated in KRunner (the code is inside KRunner), and since the major part of KDE users seems to like the default interface almost nobody knows his existence :p, but it actually exists and I can prove it!
So what’s up with QuickSand?
QuickSand is one of these software (or in this case a part of a program) which were developed in the early days of KDE4 and for some reason the maintainer(s)/authors are "missing" or are not taking care of that code anymore, this may seem sad but Hey! here is where the beautiful of the free software comes to the rescue, any interested developer can contribute and even adopt it.
What I did to QuickSand?
Basically what I did is some "maintarnership", removing/adding stuff here and there
- Unhardcoded all the colors (Now they are following the respective KDE/Plasma themes)
- Added a button to execute the system activity
- Tunned the interface a little bit
- Fixed some relayouting issues when accessing to the options
- Add "Esc" as a shortcut to close the interface (AAAAH! that was really needed)
- Fix the only known crash (Has been backported to 4.4.4)
- Some other minnors changes.
This is the result
I’ll write an entire post about QuickSand, I think that it is an interesting concept and I may adopt it in the future (KDE 4.7 at least).
Tomorrow the hard work on Kamoso will start, stay tuned!
ah why did you do that!
now I cannot decide which interface to take anymore, thanks a lot for that…
no really thank you
I always loved Quicksand (or whatever it was called back then) in the KDE3 days. I was so happy to see an attempt to bring it back, but when it did come back it was… ugly.
Your version is looking much nicer. A couple of things that would really help though:
1. Get rid of / hide / give people a way to turn off the list that pops up to the right when you start typing. If I wanted a list of text extending downward, I’d use the standard krunner interface.
2. There’s an excessive amount of empty space and unnecessary elements. It could be visually much more elegant by taking out the space at the top, the “Quicksand” label, optionally the aforementioned “x items” and compressing whats left to one line.
3. There’s also space being wasted by displaying results in the middle and to the right but with nothing on the left. I suggest that rather than showing:
blank blank blank item 1 item 2 item 3
that it show
item6 item4 item2 item1 item3 item5
So that the top search results are in the middle and then fanning out left and right, showing twice as many results.
Thanks for picking this up and running with it. Good luck!
Actually it would probably be better showing item1 item2 item3 item4 item5 item6…
Just get rid of the wasted slots.
Also, why not show what you’re typing where it says “Type to search” instead and save some more space. It would also be more obvious to people imho.
Thanks for your suggestions, I’ll work on that the next time I have some free time to hack on QuickSand.
Thanks! It’s appreciated!
Have fun.