Friday, November 6, 2009

Information Panel and Tooltips

Dolphin for KDE 4.4 will provide a refactored information panel and refactored tooltips. The goals of the refactoring have been:
  • Show the same data in the information panel and the tooltips. Up to now the information panel did not provide any information about the permissions or the owner of a file. The tooltips have shown this kind of information already, but they did not provide informations like rating, comments or tags.
  • Prevent a possible blocking of the user interface, even when a slow Nepomuk backend or a buggy Strigi analyzer is installed. Although in KDE 4.3 some improvements had been done already, there have been still problems in this regard especially for tooltips.
  • Improve the layout of the information. The rating, comment and tags information are not handled in a special manner anymore.
  • Simplify the interface for editing tags and comments.

Although there is still a lot of finetuning necessary until KDE 4.4, it is obvious already that the tooltips...


... show the same information as the information panel:


Originally it was planned to move the refactored widget to kdelibs, so that applications like Mailody, Gwenview and Okular can show the informations in a similar way. However there have been some usecases especially in combination with Gwenview, where the interface of widget was not sufficient yet. So we decided to leave the widget in Dolphin for KDE 4.4, but I'm confident that we find a good solution until KDE 4.5.

21 comments:

Unknown said...

If in the future you make it a kdelibs widget please include it in Konqueror too.

It was told that Konqueror as a file manager wouldn't be harmed by making Dolphin the default - and a file properties sidebar would (logicaly, and I guess technically too) completely possible in Konqueror too.

Thanks.

Unknown said...

Looks good, one thought: do we really need to see the owner and permissions there? How many people will even know what that means, let alone be browsing files in Dolphin where it is relevant?

Ramsees said...

If you gonna show the same information in tooltip, why do you need the panel?

Anonymous said...

Looks good, but are tooltips clickable? I guess they are not :) you probably want to hide the links in them.

Unknown said...

There was one bug in Dolphin witch I did not report because it was small bug, but since you are working on Information panel....

I keep Information panel turned off, and I turn it on only when I need it. I always have to resize Information panel so it could display image/video preview as expected.
Small preview of image:
http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/4343/dolphinwrong.png
After I have resized it little - big preview:
http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/9941/dolphincorrect.png

Unknown said...

@Tom: per default owner and permissions are disabled

@Ramsees: You cannot change the rating, tags and comments in the tooltips. Also in opposite to the information panel the tooltips cannot show the meta information for multiple selected files (the tooltip context is always one file). Additionally the information panel can be resized dynamically.

@Aurélien: Yes, this is the kind of finetuning that is still missing :-) I'll hide the links in the tooltips until 4.4...

Angel Blue01 said...

Can we customize what information appears in the tooltips/infor panel?

Unknown said...

@Stefan: thanks for the hint, I'll try to fix the issue ASAP

@Angel Blue01: yes, it can be customized which information is shown

KDE user from Poland said...

"@Tom: per default owner and permissions are disabled"

ufff ;) good, thank you :d

Ivo Anjo said...

"Prevent a possible blocking of the user interface, even when a slow Nepomuk backend or a buggy Strigi analyzer is installed."

Could this also be done for slow kioslaves? Dolphin's interface tends to block a lot when using slow kioslaves, and because all dolphin windows are in the same process, it even makes local browsing block.

Fri13 said...

One of the features what I miss on the Dolphin (on Konqueror as well) is possibility to hide statusbar.

Now the information panel show same information as well as the statusbar. Amount of selected files and sizes.

The statusbar has meaning usually when we have a zoom slider or space bar there. But I can not find purpose if those gets removed.

And if we could get those features to information panel, we could have a feature to remove the statusbar from same place as now enabling those two options or then from configure > hide statusbar. Same way as menubar.

I like the Dolphins idea to have all information on two panels on either sides or on one side. The toolbar and menubar can be configured almost any possible way (no possible to move the breadcrub :-( ) but the statusbar is forced to have, like on konqueror as well. It takes lots space on smaller screens (MID's, Netbooks etc).

Great work and nice to see we get more features to use the information panel.

Capi Etheriel said...

this is probably not the place to ask, but... when it comes to info about images, the one that always comes to my mind is.. size! yet dolphin won't show that info, and i have to open gwenview just for the numbers...

Bugsbane said...

@barra

Absolutely! I keep wishing that I could see the height and width, far more so than comments and tags (which I'm not using until Nepomuk lets me move stuff between computers wihout losing) and filetype (which I can generally see from the icon/filename.

Being able to see height/width of images would be *awesome*

On a side note, I would *love* to see a "Recent Folders" docker that just listed the folders that you had most recently performed an action in. This would be any folder where you had done something (eg copied to/from, deleted files, renamed files etc). It would make a lot of common back and forward file navigation *much* faster.

Anyway, thanks for your efforts Peter. Dolphin *rocks*! :)

Anonymous said...

Where can I get these wallpapers?

Great work btw ;)

Anonymous said...

any chance that similar info for audio and video files can/will be displayed in a similar manner?

Unknown said...

@IAnjo: The blocking in the information panel was not related to KIO slaves, it was related to Nepomuk/Strigi. Maybe you can post a usecase of slow KIO slaves at bugs.kde.org, so that I can try to reproduce the issue and fix it (or forward it to kdelibs)? Thanks!

@Fri13: In Dolphin the statusbar shows things that are not available in the information panel (error messages, information messages etc.) Sure it would be possible to move this to the information panel, but honestly speaking I don't plan to implement this.

@barra/.ponto & Bugsbane: Dolphin shows the information if Nepomuk/Strigi is enabled, but there is currently no fallback if it is disabled :-(

Bugsbane said...

Good to know, Peter.

So what do you think of the "Recent Folders" docker idea?

Anonymous said...

Having image size (pixels) would be a really handy information !

Diederik van der Boor said...

Wonderful stuff!

I've got one feature requets: could you please show the image dimensions for all type of image files? For me at least (as webdeveloper), that is one of the most important meta-data of pictures.

Anonymous said...

Incredible! the dolphin file manager is amazing,i was searching for a good file manager and i found it,
Keep goodwork man.
God Bless you guys.

Plasma said...

Having image size (pixels) would be a really handy information !

I second that. Wouldn't it be possible to reuse some old code from Konqueror for that job? Those image plugins dealt with nearly every file format I came across. Information about image resolution (and maybe even bitdepth) is just essential.

Being an imperative necessity to run Nepomuk/Strigi, which constantly eat 20% CPU on my box and sometimes need hours to index newly created or moved files, is simply unacceptable.