ScienceKDE
KDE for scientific work
Cirkuit 0.4.2 release announcement
Posted by on November 16, 2011
Version 0.4.2 of Cirkuit has just been released. Two major bugs have been fixed:
- the Upload example dialog was not working after a ‘Save As…’
- there was an issue with duplicated menu items when using a translation (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=285658)
and additional bugs that could lead to segmentation faults are also fixed now.
A part from bugfixes, there is one change in the user interface: the status bar has been removed. I remember reading a discussion on plasma-devel about status bars in general, and I realized that the status bar in Cirkuit was really sub-optimal. For example, error messages were displayed on the statusbar only and they could easily be unnoticed. Now, a KMessageWidget is used to notify the user of preview generation events. I think it is quite an improvement over the statusbar: the messages are much more visible now and the user is still not required to click anything to go on with his work.
A couple of screenshots showing Cirkuit without the status bar and with active messages:
Nice to see KMessageWidget spreading, (even if it was not intended to be used in such contexts…)
I think your interface will look nicer if you add a bit of space between the widget and its parent. You can use KDialog::marginHint() as a reasonable space value. If you want to go a bit further, you can copy the WidgetFloater class from Gwenview: it is a helper class which makes it possible to keep any child widget floating over a predefined position. In your case you could use it to keep the KMessageWidget horizontally-centered and aligned to top or bottom.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve just committed a first attempt using the WidgetFloater class and it seems to work nicely.