Information Panel

Dolphin for KDE 4.3 will have some improvements for the Information Panel. One improvement is that Nepomuk is used to get the meta data, which allows to show a lot more information:


Currently the meta data titles are internal names used by Nepomuk (e. g. "audioCodec"), but this (hopefully) will be improved until KDE 4.3 so that it is written as "Audio Codec:".

It is also possible now to configure which informations should be shown:


Because of Phonon it is possible to play audio files:


... or even videos:


Please note that it is not the intention to convert Dolphin into an audio-player or video-player. The current functionality is just meant as improved preview for media files.

Final remark: Until KDE 4.2 it was possible that Dolphin got blocked for several seconds when reading the meta data of specific files (huge videos, compressed files). The nice thing about using Nepomuk is that no blocking occurs anymore, as the meta data parsing has been done already outside the context of Dolphin.

Directory Thumbnails

Usually after a KDE version has been released, it's quite clear for me how Dolphin will look like in a half year for the next release. The time for feature development is quite limited, so there is only a small set of features that can make it into one release.

The best thing of being part of the KDE community is when other KDE developers provide patches for useful features, that I did not have on my Todo-list at all. This happened recently when David Nolden submitted a patch for directory thumbnails. I even did not notice the feature after it had been committed (the code for this is outside the scope of Dolphin). I only got aware about this because David send me a mail, where he asked about the reason of having a wrong alpha blended background for directory thumbnails.

I tried to fix the issue and did some adjustments in the code to have the image folder as background and the images aligned in front of the folders. Well I'm no real artist and two days later another mail was in my inbox. This time from Fredrik Höglund, who provided a patch to improve the look of the directory thumbnails by a nice white border and shadow.

David already wrote about this feature in his weblog and even added a very useful slideshow feature for previews. Feeling somehow guilty that Dolphin got improved by a feature I even did not have on my radar I wanted at least to take care on the remaining issues:

• fix scaling issues for large directory thumbnails

• improve the performance

• let the user configure which previews should be generated

The scaling of the icons in general was not as good as possible. This was especially visible with large icon sizes and has been fixed now:


The directory thumbnails get cached now and are quite fast after creating the thumbnails at least once. Before showing the directory thumbnail it is checked whether the directory content has changed to assure that no outdated cache is used.

Still it is possible that some people don't like this feature, so I added a configuration to let the user decide which previews should be generated:


I'll write about the other features that will appear in Dolphin for KDE 4.3 during the next week :-)

Trees

Per default the details view in Dolphin looks like this:


and can be configured to be a tree view:


Some settings in Dolphin, like 'Show Hidden Files', 'Show Preview', 'Sorting' and 'View Mode' are remembered per directory, which means that e. g. directory A can be configured to always show previews, while directory B can be configured to show just icons.

Other settings are global. For example the icon view can be configured to have a specific font. When changing the font, this font will be used for all directories where the view mode is an icon view.

The decision which setting is global and which setting is directory dependent is not easy. Currently the setting whether the details view offers collapse/expand-items for the tree functionality is a global setting and is called "Expandable folders". We are unsure whether there are use cases to remember this setting per directory or not and if we should change this in KDE 4.3.

Remembering the "Expandable folders" setting per directory would make it possible to have a tree view for directory A, while having a details view for directory B. I would be very interested to have some feedback for this topic by providing a use case that makes it useful remembering this per directory.

Generally speaking remembering the settings per directory has the benefit of being very flexible, but this flexibility also has it's drawback: Each time a new directory is created or entered the first time, more view dependent settings have to be adjusted.

So what do you think?

PS: All users that have activated the option "Use common view properties for all folders" I'd kindly ask to give no feedback, as with this setting all options are global settings and not directory dependent :-)

Dolphin Features for KDE 4.2

The feature freeze for KDE 4.2 starts on the November the 17th. Time again for a summary of the features that made it into Dolphin since KDE 4.1...

Improved zooming support. It's now possible for all view modes (icons, details, columns) to adjust the zoom level from 16 x 16 pixels to 256 x 256 pixels. Like in Gwenview a zoom slider is offered in the status bar:


It is still possible to configure having the volume space information like known from previous Dolphin versions.

Tooltips show previews:


Improved URL navigator. It is configurable whether the URL navigator shows short paths (a path "/home/peter/docs/pictures" is replaced by a places name like e. g. "My Pictures"):


or always the full path:


Information panel speed improvements. Even if a slow Nepomuk backend is used, the Information Panel won't block Dolphin anymore when doing selections or opening folders.

Automatically open folders when dropping items.

Triggering of items behaves like in KDE 3 for the details view. Only the icon and name act as target area, not the whole width of the name column.


Drag and drop support in combination with tabs.

Special thanks go to Simon St. James which contributed the tooltip- and detail view-features.

URL Navigator Improvements

One core feature of Dolphin is the URL navigator, which allows to navigate quickly through the file hierarchy:


To edit URLs in a traditional way a click on the empty space right beside "Documents"...


... allows to edit the URL manually with the keyboard:


A drop down menu for fast access on bookmarks is available:


Most readers of this blog are already familiar with the URL navigator, so why do I explain something obvious? Well, we currently try to do some improvements for KDE 4.2 and I'd like to get some feedback for our plans. It is clear that the feedback to this blog might not represent the main target user group of Dolphin. However if something is fundamentally wrong, then I'm sure this can be noticed quite fast :-)

Before sharing our plans, I must explain one very important point of the URL navigator: For me the main feature of the URL navigator is the hiding of parent URLs. For example if a bookmark called "My Documents" is created which is represented by the URL "file:///home/peter/Documents", then the navigation bar looks like this:


This is something I don't intend to change, as for purists still the editable mode of the URL navigator shows the original URL in its full glory.

However there have been some requests about a missing "Go Up" button. I usually responded that a "Go Up" button can easily be added to the toolbar already and there is no need for adding a "Go Up" button to the URL navigator. But I've to admit that depending on the used bookmarks sometimes a "Go Up" is more efficient than selecting a bookmark and going down the hierarchy again. For example my bookmarks look like this:


I've other user accounts I use for development ("/home/kde42dev") and sometimes there is a need to access files from there. I don't like to add this accounts to the bookmarks, as this usecase is quite rare. So currently I have to select the "Root" bookmark, select the "home" directory and select "kde42dev". It would be great if I could access the parent directory without the need of choosing a bookmark and going down the hierarchy again.

So Aurélien Gâteau (= Gwenview maintainer) and I had a discussion about this. We agreed that a kind of "show parent paths" button would be useful, like this mockup shows:


But after trying this approach I just did not feel comfortable. It's a little bit mysterious what the "show parent paths" button really does. If it shows the whole path as breadcrumb then this would conflict with the intention of the URL navigator to hide parent URLs. Also coming up with a good icon is not easy - for this mockup I just used a mirrored arrow, which is not acceptable from my point of view.

So I tried just to add a "Go Up" button:


and for me this solved two issues:

1. There is no need to explain what this button does, as people have been used this kind of button since years in file managers.
2. If the URL navigator is in the editable mode and no "Go Up" button is in the toolbar, then this button allows to go up the hierarchy.

The only drawbacks I see currently are that a little bit less space is available for the breadcrumbs and that some visual clutter is added.

So this is the point where I'm not sure how to proceed: Is the "Go Up" button a good solution or do we solve a problem that never existed? Is a kind of "show parent paths" a better approach? If this is the case: What icon should be used? Are there other ideas we are not aware of?

So I'd kindly ask to give us some feedback :-) Please note that I won't reply to any comments to this topic, as I don't want to influence the upcoming feedback.

PS: Some graphic gurus might have noticed that the home-icon is not vertically centered correctly. This has been fixed for KDE 4.1.1.