Fixing bug 5241

Today I fixed the oldest KOrganizer bug which was in the bug tracking system. The report was more than three years old. It was about the "awkward implementation of the 'add event' use case" and said that it should be possible to select a time range with the mouse and then create the event by just typing the summary. Ok, now it finally works.

I was always reluctant to address this issue, because it would have meant to implement in-line editing for events. Other organizers have this and it's confusing as hell, because it means that an event can exist in different modi and it's not obvious how to switch between the modi, how to switch an event that is being edited into a state where it can be moved by the mouse or where it just is selected etc. Other problems with in-line editing are that many events are so small that the line edit would only have room for a couple of characters and that it adds a lot of complexity to the implementation of the event widgets.

We discussed this issue in Nove Hrady a couple of times. The relevantive usability study addressed this issue and some people had suggestions. So on the last day I decided to finally give it a try and try to come up with something which would solve the problem. The result is not in-line editing but type-ahead support for the event editor. When the user starts typing in the agenda view, an event editor gets opened and all the typed text is forwarded to the summary line edit. This way it's very easy to add new events, but it avoids the problems of in-line editing. I'm sure there will be people who dislike this behaviour, but after using it for a couple of days I have to say I'm quite satisfied with it.

So finally bug 5241 got fixed.