The Case of Ideal UI Mode

In Qt 4.2 trolls did amazing job at improving dockwidgets. They even added the tabbing feature so that you can group docks into the one tabwidget by just dragging one on top of another.

A couple of months ago I thought that would replace "Ideal buttonbars" - those groups of buttons you can see in KDevelop and Quanta in Ideal UI mode at the window borders. But today I think that buttons should still stay if we want the Ideal mode like we had before. We just don't have enough control of those new tabs and can't make them do what we want (i.e. hide toolviews). Also they seem to be always horizontal which is a pity because we got used to vertical rows of buttons.

So, this and this is how KDevelop4 with toolviews looks now. Notice that KDevelop4 looks exactly like Qt Designer - all toolviews are just plain dock widgets. And this is how Ideal mode looked before. Notice the "button bars" at the bottom, left and right window sides.

The question now is Qt Designer-like interface good enough or is it better to back to good old Ideal UI with buttonbars? I don't have the good answer, please share your opinion with us at kdevelop-devel@kdevelop.org or just leave a comment here.

For now I'll continue working on new Ideal library. I miss Ideal too much ;)

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