On 09.06.2015 08:33, Teppo Turtiainen wrote:

Hi,

I don't know if this is the right place to raise this but this new design feels like a step backwards. What used to be a beautiful and clear design is now much more confusing and complicated:

I'll assume you're talking about the old design in cockpit 0.27 here ... and comparing it to cockpit 0.55 (or thereabouts)?

Unfortunately the old design would have collapsed with the new components and dashboards that people are working on. It simply did not scale. So we had to change it ... but I hope we can continue to refine the design going forward and fix the remaining nagging issues.

• Controls for switching between the views used to run horizontally in

the top navbar, now they run both horizontally in the navbar and vertically in the sidebar. It's not clear to me what the division of labour between the top navbar and the sidebar is.

The items in the sidebar are for a single machine. The tabs in the top bar (most of which are still not present) are for views of multiple machines.

Everyone is adding more and more new components which put themselves in the navigation. Having everything be a top level item across the top was just not scaleable and had to change.

• The sidebar is sometimes visible and sometimes not. It's not visible

in the Dashboard but is visible everywhere else. This makes the UI jumpy.

It's showing you different content when the (per-machine) sidebar is visible. No single view jumps between the two states.

We *did* have an interim design in cockpit versions around 0.30 where you could show and hide the sidebar, and that was extremely jumpy and hard to use.

• The sidebar has an expander (Tools) despite having oodles of space

and the top navbar is now mostly empty. There is a huge amount of empty space in both.

Yeah, we should probably fix that. We could have it expanded by default when there's enough space.

• The System view has controls (Host Name, Domain, System Time and

Power Options) and graphs (CPU, Memory, Network Traffic, Disk I/O) side by side in two columns. (With the sidebar, resulting in a three column layout.) There is a large empty space below the controls and the graphs don't fit into view at once on a 1920x1080 display and so there is a scrollbar.

Yes, this page needs some work. It does try to lay itself out into available space, but seems to fall over while doing it. But it used to do the exact same thing in the old design too.

• The Dashboard view only shows one graph at a time and seems mostly

useless now. This seems to be acknowledged by having the System view (instead of the Dashboard) as default after logging in.

If you only have one server on your dashboard, then we show you that server immediately after logging in. This was a very common complaint with the old design in Cockpit 0.27 ... that after you log in you were taken to a mostly blank page which contained just the server name and a button.

Would it be possible to come up with a design that ditches the sidebar and returns the controls for switching between the views to the top navbar?

I think we can work to continue to refine what we have. Like I said we have some hard requirements that put limitations on the design, but we can do better even within those limitations.

Stef

On 03.03.2015 12:44, Stef Walter wrote:

...

After a lot of work, we merged new navigation into Cockpit today. This clearly separates dashboards from per-host configuration.

If you're tracking git master, you need to reinstall and restart cockpit.

More info:

https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/pull/1861 https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/issues/1726

Some follow up work that still needs to be done:

https://trello.com/c/59Ajm8lz/53-multiple-dashboards

This will be part of Cockpit 0.41

Cheers,

Stef

---

cockpit-devel mailing list cockpit-devel@lists.fedorahosted.org https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cockpit-devel