Hello, everyone!
It’s been a while since I don’t post anything, and very sorry for that. You soon will find out my possible reasons (or maybe some excuses).
This week the GSoC season ended and I am here with my first of the last posts about the GSoC 
First of all, I’d like to thanks everyone that made it possible and made it beautifully – including gsoc team, kde/plasma community, the qt labs america guys and, of course, Ivan, my dear, patient mentor. Thanks you all.
This was, and I really mean it, one of the most significant experiences I had – I managed to overrun myself in several aspects, since the first day I joined the kde community. Besides all the technical learning, I managed to keep a nice long-distance relationship with lots of people, and find a perfect virtual environment to work. It’s being just great.
Well, as you must know, I am working with the New Widgets Explorer, and this particular project also brought me lots of learning.
One of the most difficult tasks I had to deal with was to conceive the new UI & funcionalities of the project, and that started even before coding time began.
The Widget’s Explorer is an everyday tool for plasma users, so almost everyone that uses it has a strong opinion about it – likes, dislikes, how things should or shouldn’t be. It is obviously very hard to please everyone, since we’re all so different. I had to be prepared to hear lots of criticizes!
My first attempt to do the right thing was to arrange a virtual focus group session with plasma users – I tried my best to gather different kinds of users: developers, designers and purely users. There were 12 people in the room, and the results were great! I could analyze a huge material and came out with some nice conclusions (you can see it in previous post).
My second step was to try to express the conclusions into mockups. I drew several ones, and finally published 2 options of mockups, which you can also see in previous post (the last one). The response to those was great. I heard a lot of criticizes, got a lot of help, lots of private e-mails and blog comments with suggestions. The final choice was to use one of the mockups and embrace some helpful criticizes.
So we were done for now with the mocks. Coding time begun! Yey!
Everything was going great and I was able to create a functional mockup-like (not so much alike) version of the project. I was very excited with that, mostly because of the huge learning.
But, as we know, it is hard to please everyone – the whole idea of the project (the UI aspect) was questioned and we decided to take it to another path.
First of all, this is a screeshot I took before changing paths (not the most up-to-date one, I had more stuff done – but this was a screenshot I luckly found here ) :
The new idea, though, was to make it a long and linear list, horizontally attached to the panel – basically. So, after developing a great part of the project, I had to stop and make some other mocks.
This is one that could sketch, with the help of some community friends – the horizontal and vertical versions (yeah, vertical ’cause we needed to think about the case when the panel is on the right/left sides of the screen):
Some work was lost, and lots of hours of work were lost – more hours than code lines (those I could reuse), ’cause, as a begginer, I didn’t have the experience to code so many lines in few hours. But this whole re-working thing made me learn much more
The new idea/mockup for the project didn’t came out to public due a decision I made: I had to be able finish GSoC in time and I couldn’t be doing any back and forth work all the time (designing – coding – re-designing – re-coding) and I knew that there would be a long time of discussion over it if I did. I find this kind of discussion very productive, but I really had to finish GSoC. And, yey!, I did it!
I finally finished what we agreed to do after the whole scenario changing, and these are the screenshots of the final result
(screencasts later:)) :
There are both vertical and horizontal versions implemented. The categories are always visible, and tooltips holds more information about the applet, and also moves with animation like the plasma tooltips. The list moves with the arrows buttons and also with mouse wheel (faster with the mouse wheel). These tooltips were great idea – it can be a place for lots of stuff, like the screeshot of the applet, the number of running applets and its position in desktop…
Hopefully you’ll like it
But I am actually here to open up a space for every of you opine over it. Now that GSoC is over, I don’t mind doing back-and-forth job (for as much as it is better for the application ).
Of course there is still a lot of work to do, and I’m thrilled to raise our new child together with you!
The day after tomorrow we’re heading to Tokamak and I’m absolutely sure that the New Widgets Explorer will mature much more with those terrific guys (and girl 
)
Well, later I’ll have another post with screescasts and some other details