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KDE Developers and Usability Folks on Cooperation

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the getting-together dept.

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."

2 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Ignore the expert behind the curtain. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "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?

  2. Re:/.ers, what's wrong with you? by Stevyn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.