[maemo-developers] Application manager category view proposals

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 12:24 PM, Marius Vollmer
<marius.vollmer at nokia.com> wrote:
> "ext Ryan Abel" <rabelg5 at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3103
>
> Cool.  We are aware that the category view sucks pretty hard, and I,
> too, only ever use the All category.  I'll try to get some opinions from
> our UI designers about your proposals.

Well, in the absence of anything else, I've now added a patch against
#3103 which makes the category list look like this:

    http://bleb.org/software/maemo/h-a-m-grid.png

However, as I said in the comment on the issue, I think - if we move
to having sub-categories[1] to solve the extraneous category problem -
that the top-level category view should be no different to the package
view, i.e. using GtkTreeView.

So, I see this being step 1 along a (familiar) 5-stage path (extra
patches not necessarily from me ;-)):

    1) Put in a grid view [done]

    2) Put category list in a GtkTreeView with section-specific icons
       and descriptions, using the same code as a refactored
       src/util.cc:make_global_package_list.

    3) Add support for extra slashes in `Section' header to give
       sub-categories within a package view.

    4) Enforce that anything which isn't in the standard list of
       categories goes into 'Other' (I played with this in
       src/main.cc:canonicalize_section_name or nicify_section_name
       but it'd also need a GHashTable to combine the section
       infos).

    5) Rationalise set of top-level categories as per community
       discussion, organised via wiki[2] and mailing list[3].

Comments, as ever, welcome.

Cheers,

Andrew

[1] http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Package_categories#Defined_top-level_categories_.26_application-specific_subcategories

[2] http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Package_categories

[3] http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-community/2008-October/001163.html

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
maemo.org Community Council member