AUG
22
2006

Kickoff Start Menu - Sneak Preview

Submitted by

As previously blogged, openSUSE 10.2 will have a redesigned KDE start menu created by the KDE and usability team at SUSE, after doing usability testing with other start menus. We now have a working prototype, code-named 'Kickoff' (started during world soccer championship, obviously), which is currently being tested with real users in the SUSE usability lab. At aKademy 2006 in Dublin, Coolo will give a Start Menu Research talk about what we learned during this project. Also, we are preparing a web-page to document our research. Click on the screenshot for the whole Kickoff sneak preview experience:

Comments

I hope we'll see KickOff in the next KDE release and not only in OpenSuSE --although I'm an OpenSuSE user. It's a real improvement of the evil couple KMenu/KMenuEdit.

(c) MXLS (tm)(R)
We're living in a free world, ain't we?

By maxilys at Tue, 08/22/2006 - 14:39

If you mean with "next KDE release" (because this is KDE3/Qt3 code) KDE 3.5.5 then for sure not. And KMenuEdit is still there, unchanged and being called from the context menu of the Kickoff application browser.

By at Tue, 08/22/2006 - 14:57

That looks a whole lot more usable than the current KMenu (which I never use other than to logout). Hopefully that design will be taken into consideration for KDE 4's KMenu replacement.

By sirtalon at Tue, 08/22/2006 - 14:45

> Hopefully that design will be taken into consideration for KDE 4's KMenu replacement.

That's one idea of the project and why we want to present the start menu usability study at aKademy (and likely show many of its videos in the week after the conference to interested developers). :-)

By at Tue, 08/22/2006 - 14:53

Really nice. Seeing this screenshot was definitely jaw-dropping. :-) Keep up the good work!

By vdboor at Tue, 08/22/2006 - 15:04

Sounds at the same time usable and beautiful, good work !

I also heard about the Tenor project, which will not exactly be a KMenu but will provide similar features: links towards applications and documents related to keywords, thanks to an indexing backend. It's only a project while this startmenu will be released soon.
But maybe would it be possible, for KDE 4, to use a common library between both projects ?

By eric pignet at Tue, 08/22/2006 - 15:05

First, Tenor is intended to be much more than some keyword->application/document indexing.

Kickoff uses for the content search part Beagle (addressbook, application, bookmark and PATH searches don't require Beagle) and has not an own indexing backend. So there is nothing to share but the content search could be changed to use Tenor/Strigi/Nepomuk/Tracker/whatever.

By at Tue, 08/22/2006 - 19:52

In what way is this connected to the work Celeste has been doing for a while on the start menu?

By sebas at Tue, 08/22/2006 - 15:51

Be sure that we read Celeste's work and asked for her (and other's) feedback in Trysill and later (via screenshots) for our ideas. And as she wrote she got the questions which the persons in the SUSE usability study got asked and I think also some preliminary results.

By at Tue, 08/22/2006 - 19:43

That's what I was hoping for. Thanks!

By sebas at Wed, 08/23/2006 - 06:59

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