elementary
A way to browse subcategories
In addition to the standard .desktop categories, freedesktop covers quite a few subcategories. We should come up with a way to filter/browse by these additional categories
May I suggest a sidebar for going between these subcategories? Would look clean and "standard".
A multi-column layout might be better, since then developers can be encouraged to use subcategories to help with their app's discoverability.
Also something to keep in mind while designing: subcategories is sort of a misnomer according to the FD.o spec; a subcategory can actually belong to more than one top-level category. This works fine with linear browsing but just keep in mind that any given subcategory doesn't necessarily "belong" to a top-level category.
Would the toolbar pattern work here? I haven't seen it in use in elementary OS for quite some time, but it seems relatively well-suited.
From #570
When browsing a specific category view (e.g. "Graphics"), we should display a filter bar of the other categories (e.g. "Photography", "Vector", "Raster") that exist in the apps' metadata. Essentially, we should treat them more like tags than explicit subcategories.
This is better than explicitly hardcoding all "additional categories" because:
- Some apps have multiple additional categories
- Additional categories, according to the spec, may have zero or more explicitly related registered categories
- This lets us more intelligently group categories at the top level/home page while also enabling drilling down further
Super duper rough sketch:
This also implies carrying translations for human-readable versions of the categories.
I like the idea of diaplaying Categories first, then Tags(additional category) based on selected category. For the sake of handling some numbers, could we build some stats for every category + [num-of-apps-for-each-tag] so we can think on the number of items we should manage in the UI?
