Slashdot Mirror
KDE Developers and Usability Folks on Cooperation
sultanoslack writes "Over at NewsForge a story just popped up on the usability experts from OpenUsability and some of the issues on working with KDE development teams, specifically the KDE PIM team. There's some interesting content on the different working styles of the two groups as well as a little bit on some of the improvements that were part of the recent KDE 3.4 release."
Compiled 12.05.2005. They are customized for my own needs and are not representative.
Promotion as a happy KDE user. Proving that KDE is quite usable for me as is. See it as a gesture of friendly offering from my side. People interested to know how KDE from SVN TRUNK looks like can have a free peek.
Screenshot1
Screenshot2
Screenshot3
Screenshot4
"Open Usability - Mission Statement
OpenUsability.org is a project that brings open source developers and usability experts together.
The idea behind is simple: There are many Usability Experts who want to contribute to software projects. And there are many developers who want to make their software more usable, and - as a consequence - more successful. "
I'm going to ask because no one else will. How do you know they're usability experts? Who's doing the vetting?
I can think of MS-Office, whose menu bar icons can be re-ordered in any way wanted. When one "squeezes" or forces another menu bar to share the same area with another, this is possible with arrows indicating the availability of other items beyond the arrow.
That's my wish.
The work they have done with KDE 3.4 speaks volumes about the success and the potential of these efforts. If you had problems with the 'clutter' of KDE before (I never had I might add) and haven't tried KDE 3.4... you should. And they did it without frustrating their present userbase: no features were removed, they were just reorganized. This seems to be the difference between gnome and kde approach to usability. GNOME seems to have the 'less is more' mantra, while KDE has the 'more, better organized' mantra. Both have its merits btw - I can very well imagine that GNOME's approach suits some user's taste better, so no flames please. Me, I love every feature, and those that I don't use can be easily removed (more easily than in previous KDE iterations).
It is also interesting to see how developers had to be "converted" to cooperate with openusability folks - and it is really nice to hear that this has been a success story so far (11 KDE projects already work closely with openusability - and what's more, they enjoy it :) For instance:
"The reports produced by OpenUsability are, according to Adam, "full of clear, concrete ideas that are well-reasoned, that have an overall vision, and that follow principles. They are also an appropriate length, without being too long or vague."
Nice!
No matter what I say I'll get blasted per usual so here goes, sure kde "seems" more consistent & integrated than gnome but personally it seems like nothing but a windows ui hack, looks just like it dont it? I'm all for choice but after hearing so much about how crappy the win interface is what do we get in kde, same old thing. I use xfce4 exclusively and will never change. Let's hear from some programmers/designers on what constitutes a good albeit (subjective) interface help me bring my karma back to positive!
Step out of the box and enjoy life
and before people say "but windows sucks too!", linux and the desktop environment have to be a LOT better to win people over.
kioslaves is a major improvement. I plug a drive in, and an icon appears on the desktop. A thing I noticed randomly was if I scroll over the JuK tray icon, it skips to the next song. If I scroll over the speaker tray icon, the volume increases or decreases. When you go to rename a file, it highlights the name but not the extension because you rarely change the extension of a file. These of course are little things, but they do make a difference. There are also countless usability improvements that I can't think of right now.
KDE has come along way since the days of 1.0 and I'm sure the pace is going to increase as more people get involved.
So yeah, KDE is improving and at this pace, it may be a LOT better than windows. Of course that's before longhorn comes out and I'm sure a bunch of people are trying to get linux adoption up before that hype takes over.
I'm not a usability expert, but looking at the basic print dialogue, I see a number of things that could be done differently. Ok, there's three main control areas on the page. The top one is labelled "Printer", the middle section can have different contents depending on which tab you are in, and the bottom area consists mostly of buttons.
In the top area, there is a preview checkbox. Presumably this means print preview. But why is it in the printer control group? Is it previewing the printer? Why is it a checkbox? Presumably when it is checked, it changes the functionality of the "Print" button to "Print Preview". Wouldn't it be more sensible to have a "Print Preview" button instead?
In the form, there are multiple greyed out options and blank fields. Why is the type of the printer blank? Why is the location blank? What do I have to do to enable the output file control? Why can I specify to print all, print a range of pages, but not print the current page.
Grouping could also be improved. Why not put the "Print System currently used" under the "System Options" button? Why are the copies, html settings and advanced options all treated as tabs while the System Options is separated as a button? If the tabs are document options while the System Options are more global, then this could be made more obvious. For that matter, why exactly is HTML Settings a category of printing options.
Terminology can also be improved. What does collapse do? What do the funnel and magic wand icons next to the printer drop down signify? What information is supposed to be conveyed by the "Comment"? How is "Advanced Options" different from "System Options"?
I'm really a KDE fan, for the most part. Gnome does have its strengths, though -- like, the gnome panel is more flexible and robust, and gapplets seem a better concept than the system tray. But KDE is far more integrated and feature-rich, by light-years. However, Gnome's strength is in the apps that run on GTK: Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, Evolution, Beagle, OpenOffice, Eclipse, and well -- Gnome's games kick the shit out of KDE's shoddy selection. Why do developers choose to write these great apps with GTK instead of QT? I'm not familiar with GUI development on Linux, so could someone who maybe is familar with both toolkits enlighten me? Also, is there performance loss when running GTK apps under KDE? Is there extra load to have widgets from both toolkits running? Thanks!
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
for two things, which I really wish to see improved (disclaimer: I still use 3.3 since that's the latest stable one in Gentoo, so I apologize in advance if these have been improved in 3.4):
(1) Why on earth do icons have to be rearranged whenever a Window is minimized or resized!? I consider it affecting file management a lot - I really wish I could put icons into groups in one window, then minimize that and still have them grouped when I maximize it again (e.g. after having minimized it to open another folder from the Desktop).
(2) Please have an option to only allow one window with the same path to be open at one time - i.e. maximize/bring to front the window which is already opened from that folder instead of opening a new one. I know that some people want to have several windows from the same folder opened if they have many files in the same folder (and should have that option) but I really hate it when only part of the path name is shown and I thus I either have to look through several minimized windows in Kicker (if I have several subfolders with the same name) or open a folder again even though I know that I already have it open in another window to get the right one (getting an even more filled Kicker).
Other than those two complaints I consider KDE much better than Windows in terms of usability - I consider the configuration possibilities much more logical: Everything can be configured through Control Center or any specific thing by right-clicking wherever that specific thing is (such as with what application to open which file etc.). Windows is ridiculous - I cannot understand what people at MS have been thinking when they've put some configuration options in the Control Panel and others in Folder Options.
I can make any Desktop environment look like crap by putting thousands of icons and applets on every panel, and leaving no room for things like the actual task bar. Which should be about 2 levels high anyway, if you want to have that many windows open. Check out my screenshot
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.