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 Here’s a very early and outdated mockup screenshot we used as a basis: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 
