[Panel-devel] Kickoff / KDE 4

[Eike Hein]

Riccardo Iaconelli wrote:
> I've seen no big discussion going on here about replacing raptor with kickoff, 
> correct me if wrong, and if I'm not, I'd like to start one.

I don't have a checkout of Raptor at the moment, so I'm
not directly familiar with its current condition, but I
talked to its developers recently, and was shown screen-
shots of a horizontal sliding interface with arrows on
both ends that didn't look like it would work particu-
larly well in practice -- constantly clicking the arrows
to slide in new items would be tedious, and autoscrolling
on hover would make it a scary game of user reaction la-
tency.

I've asked repeatedly if he had read up on the research
that Ellen, Scott and Novell/SuSE have done and publish-
ed on the menu, and got a "no" back each time. On the
question of whether KDE Usability had been involved at
all in the design, the reply was that it wasn't time
yet, which strikes me as odd when it's supposed to be
nearly completed.

Overall I don't think that the Raptor thing was managed
or coordinated too well at all so far. I agree it sucks
when hard work is being passed over, but one way to
avoid that happening is for those who do the work to
talk to the rest of the project to make sure a design
is workable and agreed upon, and I don't think that
has happened here from what I've seen.


> Bye,
> -Riccardo

-- 
Regards,
Eike Hein, hein at kde.org