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OpenUsability and KDE: Cooperating on KPDF
sultanoslack writes "More from the world of usability in KDE -- there's an interview up where Albert Astals Cid, the KPDF maintainer, and Florian Grässle, a usability engineer from OpenUsability on working together to make KPDF more usable and some of the challenges in working together in a developer / usability engineer team. We've been seeing more from the OpenUsability folks lately, and they'll also be present doing a talk and staffing a booth this week at LinuxTag, Europe's largest Open Source conference." This interview-with-screenshots provides a neat look at the interaction of usability concerns and software development.
GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
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Well in my KPDF (from KDE 3.4.1) there is a "Contents" sidebar where I can see the chapters and all...
...so I guess this problem has already been resolved (if it existed in the first place :-)
The problem with KDE is, even if its usability is fine, it's all thrown out the window as soon as you open non-KDE apps, because in their infinite wisdom, open source programmers decided to divide programs up into groups, each group having completely different interfaces and settings.
Yes, this is completely unique to open source. OS X would never craft a commpletely unique interface for, say, Quicktime. Or The Calculator. It's all about the HIG for them, right?
The larger point here is that opne source developers are not a single entity, so *of course* they don't necessarily coordinate UI decisions. However, this is starting to change.
And commercial desktops like OS X and Windows don't have this excuse.
Even simple dialog boxes seem to be over 1200 pixels wide.
I hate to call you a liar, can you tell us what this "simpe" dialog is?
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Don't take it out on us just because you can't use a mouse well :-P
... what month is that date in?
... but YMMV.
The issue here is, in what order should the day, month, year numbers be put? With three dropdowns the user has to choose from valid entries.
With a text field there are ambiguous answers possible - 05/07/2005
This is the sort of user error that can be avoided by a slightly more restrictive UI.
And as for speed, I find the old tab and select works just as fast
Kevin