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Release Team Proposes Gnome 3.0 Plans
benuski writes "Today at GUADEC, the Gnome User and Developer European Conference, the gtk+ team announced their plans for gtk+ 3.0; immediately after, the Gnome release team announced their plans for Gnome 2.30 to be changed into Gnome 3.0. This would mean a release date a year and a half to a year in the future. Details are short at the moment, but the Gnome team seems to be following in KDE's footsteps, but hopefully will avoid the problems that plagued KDE 4.0's release."
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=154535
Read his blog. (Oh wait, you can't. He took it down, but check for archived versions!)
And read dot.kde.org and you'll see a plethora of these comments lately from him.
That bug is a good source of many such comments however.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Why don't you ask the Plasma developer*s* (i.e. more than just Aaron)? In addition the KDE feature plans [kde.org] are linked to from the front page of the KDE TechBase. For things not covered there you could add Planet KDE [planetkde.org] to your news reader or subscribe to the panel-devel [kde.org] mailing list. Want to see all commits made just to plasma? Use the KDE commit filter [kde.org].
Most of the areas of KDE have some nice long-term planning. Many areas of KDE 4 were well planned out ages ago. Plasma however is another story. The abandonment of the current icon implementation and the implementation of folder view demonstrate that there was no early grand plan for the Plasma desktop. Again, a grand revolution was promised when people didn't even know how icons were going to be handled. Aaron repeatedly says that he has long term plans, but has no intention of spelling them out. That just isn't very useful.
As far as Aaron he's been under a constant heap of criticism lately because Plasma in KDE 4 is not *exactly like* kicker+kdesktop in KDE 3 so perhaps you can excuse him for being irritable.
About 9 months back I suggested to Aaron that when KDE 4.0 launched, he had better prepare himself for all the flack he was going to get. I suggested some of it was going to be undue, and that he needed to prepare to put on his PR hat. Instead I got flamed for suggesting that anyone might have any negative reaction to the 4.0 release, and no one listened. About two weeks ago I suggested he could/should focus either on PR and let others code for a while, or focus on code and let others handle PR for a while. It seemed like wearing both hats was wearing on him, and he wasn't as productive as he wanted to be in either arena.
People started calling him Hitler and everything. Perhaps if he had heeded my friendly advice, he would be better prepared to deal with this crap. Maybe they could have preempted a bunch of this with some good PR and education. Instead, when I offer friendly advice I'm labeled a troll and attacked. I have never once attacked the guy. I just state that I disagree with some of his opinions as of late.
Given the statements he is making, I understand why people are irate. They should be. I empathize that he is likely stressed out. When you spend a great deal of time on a community project to have people throw shit in your face, it seems like everyone is ungrateful. I really empathize. But him suggesting end users shouldn't have configuration options, or that end users don't know enough to discuss interface issues is alarming. He isn't helping his case.
In fact, his statements are just bringing more shit down on his head.
Have you ever thought that taking the trouble to make a program easier to use doesn't necessarily imply that the user is dumb?
Except the Gnome interface guidelines directly state that users can't be given choices because they are too stupid to understand them. Linus had a great flamefest back and forth with the Gnome devs over this issue. Linus gave them patches to improve configuration options, and they rejected them.
A good design should be intuitive. Sometimes choice is called for, and sometimes it isn't.
On Windows I use 7-zip. I can right click and select a bevy of great options. I can select "Extract to..." which gives me a dialog if I need to provide specifics of where to extra my file to. There is also a context menu option for "Extra to filenamefoo" which creates a folder that mirrors the name of the compressed file.
Extracting a file in KDE 4's Ark is a nightmare. 7-zip and most extraction programs demonstrate that alternatives exist that require fewer clicks and dialog windows. I'm not against simple. 7-zip also provides tons of features and dialog options, but they don't get in the way of doing something quickly when you need to.
Gnome's answer is to limit features. Ark's answer is to give you tons of dialog windows. Ideally, the options should exist, but not get in the way.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
About goddamn time; GTK has had the equivalent feature (drawing using native QT widgets for integration) for years.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.