This week in Usability & Productivity, part 19

This week we announced a beta of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.13 release, and so far the internet seems pretty excited about it. 🙂 But we’re nowhere near done, and here’s another week of Usability and Productivity enhancements to highlight:

New Features

Discover now shows the download speed in the transactions overlay (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
Discover now shows transactions’ command-line output when using Arch Linux (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)

Bugfixes

When switching categories using the sidebar in System Settings, you are now prompted to apply or discard unsaved changes (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
When multiple user accounts are present, logging into any of them no longer causes one of the other ones to not appear in the User Manager System Settings page (Valeriy Malov, KDE Plasma 5.12.6, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)
Fixed a common crash in Discover (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)
The “Open Wallpaper Image” menu item in the desktop’s context menu now works (Oded Arbel, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)
The “Minimize all windows” widget no longer breaks the Application Launcher menu when any unminimizable dialogs are open (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
KRunner searches are now case insensitive for the first letter (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)
The timer on the logout options screen now works correctly when more than one screen is attached (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)

UI Polish & Improvement

The systemwide single-click/double-click setting is now located in the Workspace Behavior System Settings page (Furkan Tokac, KDE Plasma 5.13.0):
The Look & Feel System Settings page now displays an informational warning when the “Use desktop layout from theme” checkbox is checked (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.13.0):
The context menu for notifications that have images or files in them now has all the “Open” entries grouped together on top for easier access and a clearer user interface (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.13.0):
The Quick Share Plasmoid’s icon is now the same size as system tray icons, so it doesn’t look out of place next to them (Chris Holland, KDE Plasma 5.13.0):
Gwenview now displays the preview of a folder’s content at high resolution even when the folder itself has a low-resolution icon (Peter Mühlenpfordt, KDE Applications 18.04.1):
Clicking on a pop-up note in Okular now brings it forward if there’s another note overlapping it (Simone Gaiarin, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
Okular’s search results are now easier to differentiate from highlight annotations (Oliver Sander)
Baloo (the file indexer) now ignores more types of development files, using fewer resources and easing Node.js development (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.47)
Scrolling over tabs in Plasma, QML apps, and Kirigami apps now switches the active tab, just like it does for QWidgets-based apps like Dolphin and Konsole (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.47)

See all the names of people who worked hard to make the computing world a better place? That could be you next week! Getting involved isn’t all that tough, and there’s lots of support available. Give it a try today! It’s easy and fun and important.

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal.

This week in Usability & Productivity: part 17

Here’s another big one, folks!

Regular readers might have noticed that I’ve stopped the weekly Discover posts. I’ve decided to centralize that information here, and so I’d like to highlight several weeks’ worth of awesome new features and improvements for Discover:

Discover

Discover now shows star ratings on lists and detail pages (Me, Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.13.0):
Discover now displays app icons in conformance with the active icon theme, which also fixes the issue of Discover showing Nautilus’s icon for Dolphin in Debian-based distros (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.13.0):
In Discover, when an app is available from multiple Flatpak repos, it’s now possible to choose and change which version is shown first by default (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
In Discover, apps are no longer sorted by reverse alphabetical order under certain circumstances (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)
Discover’s Flatpak transactions are now cancellable (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)
Discover no longer crashes when Flatpak transactions are canceled (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)
When using Discover to perform system updates, unchecked items no longer ever become spontaneously re-checked when the “Update” button is clicked (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)
Discover now always displays the same number of updates on both the sidebar and on the updates page (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)
Discover’s sort order chooser (added in 5.13.0) now shows what the current sort order is without having to click on it (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)

Lists in Discover (and all other Kirigami apps) now have vastly better scrolling performance (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.45)
List items on the Settings page in Discover (and all other Kirigami apps) now have a more appropriate desktop-specific UI for the hidden buttons: rather than demanding that you swipe or drag the item to the left, they appear on mouse hover (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.46):

In future posts, Discover improvements will be shown inline along with all the other changes.

Next up, here’s the week’s process on the Open/save dialog project:

Open/Save dialog project

When a file name is highlighted, the extension now remains unselected (Alex Nemeth)
The zoom slider now has a minimum size so it can’t become uselessly tiny when the window is small, and the zoom buttons disable themselves when the maximum or minimum zoom levels have been reached (Henrik Fehlauer)
The Places Panel no longer grows in width by 1px every time an open or save dialog is opened, and its width is now saved if you opt to hide it (Henrik Fehlauer)
The “Name” and “Filter” boxes are now perfectly aligned with the view above them (Henrik Fehlauer)
Inline previews are now smooth and pretty just like Dolphin’s (Alex Nemeth):

These improvements will land in KDE Frameworks 5.46.

And of course that’s not all; here’s the usual assortment of miscellaneous goodies:

New Features

Spectacle’s Rectangular Region mode now has a magnifier effect to help you capture pixel-perfect screenshots (Tao Guo, KDE Applications 18.04.09):
Okular now supports intelligently changing the focus in editable forms to the “next” form field (Andre Heinecke, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
Okular now supports form fields that become visible conditionally–e.g. only after another form field is filled in, or a warning is read and acknowledged (Andre Heinecke, KDE Applications 18.08.0)

Bugfixes

The device notifier no longer erroneously claims that it cannot mount a USB device that it’s in fact just mounted (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.46)
Custom login sounds now play as expected (Wolfgang Bauer, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)
Baloo (the file indexing service) no longer stalls and consumes excessive CPU resources when the index database has become corrupted (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.46)

UI Polish & Improvement

When you drag a file or folder to Konsole, it always pastes the path into the terminal window instead of showing a menu of options (the old menu behavior can be brought back with Settings > Edit Current Profile > Mouse > Uncheck “Disable drag and drop menu for URLs and files”
Gwenview now remembers and restores the width of the sidebar (Peter Mühlenpfordt, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
Gwenview’s video player icons are now intelligible (Huon Imberger, KDE Applications 18.08.0):
Confirmation dialogs for file operations that are not undoable now emphasize this fact with bold text (Me, Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.46):
Confirmation dialogs for deleting or trashing single files now use a regular dialog rather than a list-style dialog:
Messages in Spectacle’s Rectangular Region mode now indicate the available shortcuts more clearly, and respect the active color theme (Henrik Fehlauer, KDE Applications 18.08.0):
User pictures displayed in the User Manager and Kickoff (the systemwide application launcher) are now rendered more clearly and retain their aspect ratio if they’re not square (Kirill Tatunov, KDE Plasma 5.13):
K3B gained HiDPI support (Andrew Crouthamel, KDE Applications 18.04.1):

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal.

This week in Discover, part 11

This week we landed a significant visual improvement for Discover: the app lists have been re-implemented using a new “cards” style in Kirigami. This was a lovely collaboration between Marco Martin, Aleix Pol, and myself. And best of all, this pretty “cards”-style list is also available to other Kirigami apps!

Bugfixes

Fixed a bug that could cause Discover’s “active tasks” view to not show any progress (KDE bug 391760, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.4, authored by Aleix Pol)

UI polish & improvements

Discover’s list items look much prettier now (KDE Phabricator revisions D11316 and D11625, and commit 29a1228f67b8b65e866128df0d8aa85a72345f5b, improved in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by Marco Martin Aleix Pol, and me, Nate Graham):
The Proceed dialog no longer shows a redundant close button in the corner (KDE Phabricator revision FFFF, improved in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by me, Nate Graham):

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal.

This week in Discover, part 10

This week saw many positive changes for Discover, and I feel that it’s really coming into its own. Discover rumbles inexorably along toward the finish line of becoming the most-loved Linux app store! Take a look at this week’s improvements:

New Features

Discover can now sort apps by last release date in the browse lists and search results (KDE bug 391668, implemented in KDE Plasma 5.13, authored by Aleix Pol)

Bugfixes

Fixed a bug that could cause Flatpak apps to stop being available (KDE bug 391126, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.4, authored by Aleix Pol)
Fixed a bug that could cause Discover to fail to download Plasma or Application addons (KDE bug 390236, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.4, authored by Aleix Pol)
Fixed a bug causing Plasma and Application addons to not display large screenshots (KDE bug 391190, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by Aleix Pol)
Fixed a bug that could cause Discover to not open properly when invoked from from its context menu’s “Updates” item (KDE bug 391801, Fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.4, authored by Aleix Pol)
Fixed a bug causing Addons to not be sorted by release data correctly (KDE bug D11387, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by Dan Leinir))
Fixed a bug causing all Addon screenshots to be inappropriately rendered as square (KDE bug 391792, fixed right now, authored by Dan Leinir):

UI polish & improvements

On the Updates page, the selection text can no longer overlap with the Update button (KDE bug 391632, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by me, Nate Graham):
Increased the width of the “Add Source” dialog, so the URL is less likely to get cut off (KDE Phabricator revision D11219, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13, authored by me, Nate Graham):
Discover now uses a more intuitive and obvious UI for choosing which source to install an app from (KDE bug 390464, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13, authored by Aleix Pol):

(We’re aware of the visual papercuts in the above screenshot, and will be working to resolve them in the coming days and weeks)
Improved the app page by removing the redundant second copy of the app’s name (KDE Phabricator revision D11364, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by me, Nate Graham) and fixed the top padding (KDE Phabricator revision D11362, fixed in KDE Frameworks 5.45, authored by me, Nate Graham):
Discover now shows a more obvious and less transient page when asked to open an invalid appstream://URL (KDE bug 391756, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13, authored by Aleix Pol):

Just take a look at these screenshots! Isn’t discover looking really good these days? We’ve chewed through most of our backlog of architectural issues and are working hard on adding much-requested features and polishing the UI.

If my efforts to do, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal.

This week in Discover, part 9

We did a lot of polish work on Discover this week, and also implemented a much-requested feature:

New features

Discover now lets you change the sort order of app lists and search results (KDE bug 383518, implemented in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by Aleix Pol)

We are still working on refining and polishing the UI here, but this much-requested feature is now implemented!

UI Improvements and polish

When you’re adding a new repo, Discover now won’t let you enter an invalid URL (KDE bug 390148, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.3, authored by Aleix Pol):
Improved the usability of the “confirm package removal” dialog (KDE Phabricator revision D10992, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12, authored by me, Nate Graham):

As you can see, there’s more work to be done: alphabetize the package list, remove the red close button in the corner, reduce whitespace. Further improvements coming soon!
Improved the usability of the “Add Source dialog” (KDE Phabricator revision D11003, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by me, Nate Graham)
Transient notifications in Discover and all other Kirigami apps now last longer, so you have enough time to read them (KDE Phabricator revision D11009, fixed in KDE Frameworks 5.44, authored by me, Nate Graham)

We need your help! Consider becoming a KDE contributor, and help make Discover the best Linux app store in existence!

If my efforts seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal.

This week in Discover, part 8

This was a week of polish and preparation for Discover. We’ve got some nice new features in the pipeline but we’re not quite ready to announce them just yet. One is implemented but needs more polish, and another is under construction. I think you’ll like ’em once they’re ready! But in the meantime, here are some bugfixes and polish work:

Bugfixes

Fixed a bug causing Discover to emit scary “unmet dependency” warnings while browsing apps on certain systems (KDE bug 391142, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.3, authored by Aleix Pol)
Fixed a bug causing the back and forward arrow to appear in the screenshot pop-up before the screenshot was loaded (KDE bug 391130, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.3, authored by Aleix pol)
Fixed a bug causing apps from Flathub to not appear when clicking on the Flathub repo on Discover’s Settings page (KDE bug 391126, 5.12.3, authored by Aleix Pol)
Fixed a bug causing review headers for addons to appear malformed (KDE bug 391189, fixed in Plasma 5.12.3, authored by Aleix Pol)

UI Improvements and polish

Discover and other Kirigami apps now correctly use radio buttons for mutually exclusive actions (KDE bug 391144, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13 and KDE Frameworks 5.44, authored by Aleix Pol)

Want to see faster progress on Discover? Help us out! KDE has great software and a strong focus on usability, productivity, and user satisfaction. But we’re short in the manpower department. There are lots of other ways to contribute, too!

Kubuntu: how to fix pixellated app icons in Discover

Do your app icons in Discover look ugly and pixellated? If so, you’re probably a Kubuntu user. Every user of a recent Kubuntu version unfortunately sees horrid low-resolution icons in Discover. It’s very unpleasant.

Today I helped drive an investigation and resolution for this issue. Here’s the good news: it’ll be fixed in the upcoming Kubuntu 18.04, and you can fix it for yourself, today! Here’s how.

Run the following terminal commands:

sudo sed -i "s/hidpi/large/" /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/60plasma-discover
sudo apt update
sudo appstreamcli refresh-cache --force

Restart Discover, if it’s running

Ta-daa! Pretty, high-resolution icons:

This turned out to be a bug in how Discover was packaged in Debian. Ubuntu was re-using the Debian Appstream configuration packaging, and that packaging was erroneously downloading HiDPi versions of small icons instead of large icons. This illustrates an eternal principle in software: the price of 3rd-party and upstream dependencies is eternal communication. When every layer of software is built on top of another layer provided by someone else, communication is mandatory; when the people responsible for each layer don’t talk to one another regularly, bugs creep in. Once all parties were talking to one another in the same (virtual) room, a fix materialized literally within minutes.

Thankfully, this bug has been squashed, and Kubuntu users will once again see pretty app icons.

If my efforts seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal.

This week in Discover, part 7

The quest to make Discover the most-loved Linux app store continues at Warp 9 speed! You may laugh, but it’s happening! Mark my words, in a year Discover will be a beloved crown jewel of the KDE experience. Here’s what this past week yielded for Discover:

New Features

Discover now supports snap:// URLs (KDE bug 390298, implemented in KDE Plasma 5.13.0
Discover now displays a “What’s New” section for apps that define release information with description tags (KDe bug 389482, Implemented in KDE Plasma 5.13):

Bugfixes

Fixed a bug where searching didn’t work when the main window is narrow and shows an app page (KDE bug 390191, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.3)
Fixed a bug that caused the app list to inappropriately re-order itself after clearing a search (KDE bug 390909, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.3)
Fixed a bug that could cause Discover to get stuck in the “Checking for Updates” state (KDE bug 389072, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.3)
Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when trying to remove a Flatpak app under certain circumstances (KDE bug 390805, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13.3)
Fixed a bug that prevented Discover’s App page from being scrolled vertically when the cursor was positioned over the screenshots (KDE bug 389974, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.1)
Fixed a bug where Discover could only launch one version of an app when multiple Flatpak versions were installed (KDE bug 389079, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.3)
Fixed a bug that could cause Discover to crash while opening a .flatpakref file under certain circumstances (KDE bug 390907, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12)
Fixed a bug that could cause certain Snap apps to appear to be installed when they weren’t actually installed (KDE bug 390482, fixed in KD Plasma 5.12.3)

UI improvements and polish

Discover’s sidebar is now has a more appropriate width (KDE bug 385992, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.3):
“Application Addons” section now only has application addons, and “Plasma Addons” category now only has Plasma addons (KDE bug 390594, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.2):
Discover’s Multimedia category now has sub-categories (KDE bug 388933, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.2):

These categories are still a little rough and will display some things that shouldn’t be there, but we’re going to refine them over time.
The horizontal shadow in the screenshots view on Discover’s app page now looks good when using the Breeze Dark theme (KDE Phabricator revision D10701, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.3):
Discover no longer confusingly points users to non-existent documentation (KDE bug 390401, Fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.3)
Discover’s Install and Remove buttons now have the same icon colors in Desktop view as they do in Mobile view (KDE bug 389481, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13)
Discover’s “Check for Updates” button is now on the Updates page where it belongs (KDE bug 390347, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13)

Like what you see? Be a part of it! Becoming a KDE contributor is easy as pie, and we’re working to streamline the process every day. Help us build something of enduring value during these tumultuous times.

If my efforts seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal.

This week in Discover (and Kirigami!), part 6

This is going to be a double-header: today we’re discussing Discover as well as Kirigami–KDE’s UI framework that facilitates writing convergent apps that look and feel good on both the desktop and a mobile device.

…At least that’s the idea. The truth is, KDE users have voiced a lot of criticism for how well this works out in practice. An especially common complaint is that the desktop user experience gets short shrift, and Kirigami apps feel like big phone apps.

We’ve heard this feedback, and we’re acting on it. Over the past week, we’ve been hard at work to make Kirigami UI components behave more appropriately on the desktop, and have Discover make use of them instead of its custom components.

So I have exciting news for everyone who has complained about Discover’s design being too mobile-ey and wasting too much space: that’s going to be a thing of the past. Here’s how the Featured page now looks in git master:

No more huge header with the picture of the coffee cup that nobody liked! This is not the final appearance; there’s still polish work to be done, and we are heavily iterating over Kirigami to improve it to make the Desktop UI a first-class citizen. But it’s a model for what we’re going for.

We also added some other much-requested user-centric features to Discover, such as making reviews more prominent. Have a look!

Discover now shows the top three reviews right on the app page (KDE bug 380514, implemented in KDE Plasma 5.13):
Discover’s review submission pop-up is now more user-friendly and makes it impossible to accidentally submit a one-star review (KDE bug 390426 and Phabricator revision D10500, improved in Plasma 5.13):
Note the presence of a close button! Another much-requested feature for Kirigami pop-ups.
You can now use Discover to write an app’s first review (KDE bug 390339 and KDE Phabricator revision D10476, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.1):
Kirigami scrollable pop-ups (used for Discover’s review page) no longer let you scroll beyond the content in desktop mode (KDE bug 388942, fixed in KDE Frameworks 5.44)
Kirigami non-scrolling pop-ups (used for Discover’s review input pop-up) now have correct bottom padding (KDE bug 390032, fixed in KDE Frameworks 5.44)
Kirigami toolbar headers are bit taller their titles and navigation buttons have appropriate padding (KDE Phabricator revisions D10483 and D10524, fixed in KDE Frameworks 5.44)
Kirigami pop-ups (used for Discover’s screenshots and reviews pop-ups) now have close buttons (KDE bug 387815, Fixed in KDE Frameworks 5.44)
Discover’s “show more reviews” button now always shows the correct number of reviews, has slightly better text, and no longer lets you write the first review for apps that you haven’t installed yet (KDE Phabricator revisions D10527 and D10525, Fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13)
Items in app lists now have better top padding, so they don’t touch the header (KDE Phabricator revision D10548)
Improved the metadata for the KDE Nightly Builds Flatpak repo so it has a more appropriate name, in preparation for encouraging our users to try it out (more on that soon…):

Well there you have it. We never stop working on improving Discover, and we really do listen to user feedback. Mark my words, Discover is going to become one of the most-loved Linux software centers, you heard it here first! Help is always appreciated, so feel free to start contributing and making a difference to a project that truly matters. You don’t have to be a programmer to have an impact!

And if you look at my efforts and like what you see, consider donating on Patreon to help me do it full-time, rather than squeezing it in before and after my regular job. With your support, I could bring forth even more for KDE!

This week in Discover, part 5

This week Discover gained a lot of little UI polish improvements, and Discover developers also fixed a major crash present in 5.12.

The main Featured page now shows more apps on distros like Ubuntu and KDE Neon that have lousy AppStream data (KDE bug 390016, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.1):
Notifications now stick around for longer, so they’re easier to read (KDE bug 388087, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.1)
Discover’s button that takes you to the page where you can write a review now has correct padding within its overlay (KDE bug 390030, fixed in Plasma 5.12.1)
Fixed a prominent crash in 5.12 when searching from the app page, deleting the search term, and searching again (KDE bug 390114, fixed in Plasma 5.12.1)
Discover’s review submission button is now labeled “Submit” (KDE bug 390031, fixed in Plasma 5.13)
Discover’s review submission button is now visible but disabled for apps that aren’t installed yet, not gone entirely (KDE bug 390053, fixed in Plasma 5.13)
Discover (and all other Kirigami apps that have High-DPI and vector imagery) now look crisp and sharp when run in HiDPI mode (KDE bug 390076, fixed in KDE Frameworks 5.44)

If you like what you see, consider becoming a KDE contributor and join the team! The speed of improvements is pretty directly proportional to the amount of help we have, so the more hands on deck, the better KDE software becomes!