Reinhold Kainhofer

The Plasma desktop of KDE 4.x tries to be aesthetically pleasing, which is a good idea per se. However, in many cases things are driven a bit too far, incredibly hurting the usability. As the most extreme cases, let us look at two different types of list displays, which went awfully wrong. Basically, when showing a list, the worst you can do is to (1) display a long list horizontally or (2) center a vertical list with long entries or (3) display only the first __ characters of the entries so that they are not distinguishable any more or (4) display meaningless text in the lists.

First, the task switcher (when you press Alt+Tab). It is not fundamentally flawed, but the centered window titles make it much harder to find the correct window. If the list of window titles were left-aligned, the icon and the title would be next to each other, making it much easier to find the entry you are looking for:

The other, much worse case is the "Add widget..." functionality of the panel:

This "list" tries to display a list with a hierarchy horizontally!!! Leaving aside for now the fact that when you move the mouse cursor out of the widget (and thus activate another window when "point and activate" is enabled) the widget completely disappears, which is a completely different bug.

On top of the widget, there is the category selection "list" with several problems:

• It is a horizontal list, so you don't know how long it is and where inside the list you are when scrolling
• The selected item is displayed like a button, although it is only non-clickable entry of the list!

Below there is the list of Plasma widgets to be added. Again, there are several problems here:

• It is a horizontal list, so you don't know how long it is and how many remaining items you'll have to look at
• The text for each entry is cut off, so you have a caption like "Arbeitsflachen-", together with a generic icon. Together these two facts make the entry completely meaningless, since the cut-off text and the icon don't tell you much about the entry. Only the tooltip will give you the full title.

And combined, if you look closely, there is another inconsistency between those two:

• The Left/Right buttons for the list of available widgets are placed on the far left and on the far right of the list, while the same buttons for the category list are both placed on the right (which makes it easier/faster to navigate).

Don't get me wrong: I think it's good idea to explore alternative display methods for available data, but here I think we have two cases of list displays gone quite wrong....