Plasma/Active/PA4/Files
PA4 tasks discovery process for Files application.
Functional Defects
Method
One line per defect describing it. We will triage confirmed and unfixed to bugs.kde.org.
| Status | Name | Summary | Developer |
|---|---|---|---|
| TODO | Tag reset | Select a tag, change file type being shown; tags UI is reset and you can not un-set the tag selected |
|
| TODO | Folders deadend | Perform a search that results in a folder being shown; enter the folder. The sidebar UI becomes permanently disabled. |
UI Improvements
Method
One section per issue. User stories for workflow related issues. Include a problem statement and possible solution:
Problem: ... User story: ... Suggested Solution: ...
| Status | Name | Summary | Developer |
|---|---|---|---|
| TODO | Sidebar Tabs | Description |
|
| IN PROGRESS | Intro Page | Description |
|
| TODO | Copy to/from memory card | Description |
|
| TODO | icon view resize | Description |
|
Sidebar Tabs
Problem: The sidebar tabs match the content area background, do not always line up with the sidebar and are visually noisy as separate tabs.
Suggested Solution: Merge the three tabs into a single (visually) tab with dividers between the words; make the width be the sidebar width and position directly above it; adjust the image used so that it matches the sidebar "hatch" background better visually.
Suggested Solution #2: change the tabbar ui with a navigation based one: only the first type sidebar is shown. Besides resource type radiobuttons, it has buttons to go into timeline, tags etc. when in timeline page there would be a back button. To make this easier to navigate, the sidebar can be resizable to allow 2 columns, having the main type sidebar always visible.
Intro Page
Problem: the intro page is redundant with the main sidebar: there are the same categories and they may get out of sync. Moveover it makes people want to "go back" when there is no need to.
Suggested Solution: get rid of the intro page completely. Start with just the sidebar, selecting a category makes the main page slide in.
File Copy
Problem: it is possible to copy a file from the internal storage to a removable device or viceversa by dragging over the toolbar buttons, but this is not intuitive at all.
Suggested Solution: have the info sidebar discussed for rename with also buttons for copy and move from/to removable devices.
Icon View
Problem: when the sidebar is opened/closed, the icon view is not very fast to resize, and it's painted with a misaligned layout for a fraction of second
Suggested Solution: usea vertical scrolling GridView, it's less complex, faster to resize and having less instantiated qml objects and less proxy models should be in general a bit more performant. It also makes easier to select items in more than one page.
Missing Functionality
Method
Provide a user story describing the workflow that is not currently possible. Implementation planning will happen in a second round. (So detailed solutions do not need to be suggested.)
Content-type Specific Metadata as Tags
Jerry has copied a number of photos from his camera SD card to his tablet. He opens Files to view the images and finds select metadata in the Tags section pulled from the keyword and geolocation metadata of the images. Similarly, he has a number of books on his device with author and other metadata associated with them. When opening books, this metadata appears in the Tags automatically.
Suggested Solution: provide some specific UI for resource type (the same ones as the sidebar: documents, music, images...) that ui, living in the sidebar will allow to filter by metadata specific for the type, like author, album, geolocation, etc. Types of metadata can be specific for a resource type, for instance Album would be available only in "music"
File rename, delete, remove tags
Jerry has copied some photos on his device, but their names are auto generated by the camera, eg DSCN00001.jpg, so he wants to rename at least some. Then after organizing his album, wants to delete some photos that are just duplicate multiple takes of the same thing. Some day after, looking again at the album, he finds that he doesn't like how tags are and wants to either change or remove tags from some photos, or delete a tag entirely.
Suggested Solution: when a single file is selected, an info panel can be displayed in the sidebar, with some controls such as rename, delete and the list of tags. Then they can be deleted from there. The tags bar can also have a long press context menu on individual tags, for rename or delete.
Add items to activity
Sandy wants to add some items to the current activity and hits the "Add Items" button in the home screen. She is presented with an user interface that looks and behaves remotely similar to the file browser, but presents major discrepancies.
Suggested Solution: make the minimal part of the files browser, (what doesn't need c++ parts) a component usable from elsewhere, with limited functionality as a "file picker". would be great to inject it also as standard file open dialog for qt apps, but that could require ugly hacks.