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Kuroo - a GUI for gentoo’s portage meets OpenUsability

Thursday, February 9th, 2006

Back then at akademy (remember, remember those hot days in September?) Tina and I gave a talk about personas. Together with the attendees we discussed target user groups for a graphical frontend for portage, gentoo’s package management. A few months earlier Karim Ryde happened to registered at OpenUsability.org, seeking usability advice for his project Kuroo - a KDE frontend for portage. Now put these efforts together, add another usability engineer from OpenUsability, namely Bjoern Balazs, and what do you get? Right, a surprisingly usable GUI for portage.

Based on the findings from the personas talk and the previous kuroo versions Karim, Bjoern and I evaluated use cases and discussed the set of necessary features. Then Bjoern came up with a mockup in Qt Designer which we further refined in various irc sessions. Here’s a very early and outdated mockup screenshot we used as a basis:

The main changes Karim in the end implemented are:

  • We reduced the number of tabs and replaced them with a QListBox (let’s call it a “icon menu list”). This makes the whole GUI look cleaner and provides the possibility to use the queue icon from the icon menu list as a guide in the package view.
  • The category tree view was replaced with two lists side by side. This gives us a much better overview over the categories and available subcategories. Believe me, browsing the portage tree has never been easier!
  • Kuroo now features a powerful filter mechanism. You can filter all packages or preselect a category and subcategory. If you filter all packages, kuroo grayes out the categories that don’t return any hits. The filter line filters as-you-type and notifies you visually if a package matches your query. It’s a filter mechanism that should satisfy both beginners and power users.
  • The all new package inspector offers easy access to package specific version and use-flag settings. To avoid clutter and information overflow details about each package like changelog, ebuild, dependencies moved there and away from the main window.
  • The queue view shows progress bars to reflect the status of enqueued packages. You can get a quick overview over which packages are already emerged and how long approximately the remaining ones will take.
  • Plus the usual “many many more changes” ;-)

    • The old kuroo 0.71 with a lot of tabs at the top and bottom and two tree views (click picture for a larger view):

    The brand new kuroo 0.80beta1 featuring the icon menu list and the new category selector (click picture for a larger view):

    For more screenshots visit Kuroo at kde-apps.org.

    If you are using gentoo and prefer KDE applications, you may want to give the Kuroo 0.80beta1 ebuild a try. Especially the filtering mechanism beats the pants off the emerge shell commands. Stop by at #kuroo on freenode and tell us what you think about the new interface. Feedback and bug reports are highly appreciated :-)

    Posted in kde, kuroo, openusability | 14 Comments »

    Panoramalaga

    Tuesday, September 6th, 2005

    I finally managed to play around with some of the photos I made during the touristic visit to Malaga on Thursday last week. The result: one of those nifty panorama photos

    Of course I wanted do to do this with linux and free software only. So It took me some time to find and install the programs I needed (namely hugin and pano-tools). About 15 minutes I spent clicking together control points to virtually stitch pictures together into one piece. Another 30 minutes of intensive guessing later I finally figured out who that guy on the right was: It was our tourist guide. Ask him if you want to know more about the buildings you can see on the 600 KB full sized panorama picture ;-)

    Posted in akademy, kde, malaga, panorama | 4 Comments »

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