Hello all,

I have for some time been hacking around with Kickoff, looking to
improve it, and make it definitely more TDEish.

While it is not our default menu, we do provide it built in. Therefore
I think it needs to be as good as it can get.

I also think it is of the utmost importance that we follow the TDE HCI
model that Tim drew up. This means that some things in the current
Kickoff layout are not good.

If you look at this link: http://imgur.com/h6xhB

I've drawn arrows and other things in reference to what I am explaining
here, also I've drawn numbers so it's easy to compare.

1) The width of kickoff takes up much to much real estate, and wasted
real estate. My estimate is that we can shave off a good 50-60 pixels
off of it to reduce screen space with almost no sacrifice.

2) We need to remove the "search" text field. It does nothing, it is
not helpful, it is not intuitive, it is just a waste of space. Remove
it, and make the actual search area larger. To make it clear that it
is a search bar, we can do like the regular KMenu search does and have
grayed out letters saying "search..."

3) We also could either A. remove the search icon entirely or B.
shrink it to stop wasting space. Also currently this is a mng file
(basically a dead format that never took off). the animation doesn't
work. hopefully I can just use a regular pixmap instead.

4) in line with the HCI model on the Etherpad, large buttons are bad.
this is not a tablet, and tablet interfaces are not optimal. We can
shrink the tabs a bit, (probably 8-10 pixels each) this fits in with
1) to reduce the width.

5) I say we remove this bottom bar entirely. KMenu does not have it. I
do not think we need to know what user is and what host. I do not
think it is worth the real estate. Also we definitely don't need a
link to the website. If people want to go to our website, they will.
They don't need a button on the main menu.

6) the kickoff logout dialog is this: "logout?" where as the KMenu
shows up a nice dialog with options to hibernate etc. Either barrow
this from KMenu or add options for each of these in the menu.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Does anyone actually use kickoff?

Calvin Morrison