RFC: changes to the About application

[Carl Symons]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 5:52 AM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> ** Proposed Change **
> Add links to plasma-active.org to "About" page, include the intro video if it
> still exists on disk, replace the technical "cross-device user experience"
> with something more meaningful to the user, open links in a Browser window,
> move the mention of Contour and Basyskom to the Authors tab.
>
> ** Reason For Change **
> Right now the About dialog has very little value to the user. It is, really,
> all about us and how great we are. ;) The only moderately useful information
> there is the version numbers, and then generally only for debugging or manual
> compatibility checking purposes. In this  sense, I think we lost site of the
> "users first" goal here. i'm doubtful it really belongs as the first item in
> the launcher, but if a "remove item" context menu entry is added here (as
> proposed in the RFC on adding icons to the launcher) then that should become a
> moot point, but right now it's just _always_ there.
>
> I also think putting one specific authors / contributors link on the About
> page sets up a very unfortunate community dynamic that makes trying to get
> other companies interested more difficult and which does not demonstrate
> proper respect for those who also contributed significantly to the concepts
> and code in prior times.
>
> the unhumble, does-not-improve-the-user's-experience nature of this
> application deserves fixing.

It's out of the ordinary compared to "About" in other applications.
They are usually plain and sparse, with an author section or link that
displays many people (e.g., Inkscape and LibreOffice).

However...Plasma Active has an interesting and novel "About" story
that includes more than Contour. (Taking nothing away from how cool or
ground-breaking Contour is.) This is something that's worth
presenting. Maybe another tab for history/background. Or just the link
to the plasma-active website.

The actual User Interface is primarily Contour, and involves other
not-so-obvious elements that are departures from "how tablets work".
Something in the "About" application regarding how to operate the User
Interface would be nice. When I hand the tablet to someone who doesn't
want a demo, they _always_ start swiping and pinching. Pulling the
tabs. They already know how a user interface works, and this isn't it.

There should be some acknowledgement of the contributions of basysKom
and the Contour team, but not such that it diminishes other
contributors or potential contributors.

Carl

>
> ** Implementation Details **
> - needs to check if the welcome video is still there; if not don't include it
> - links clicked on should not be shown in-line as there is no navigation
> provided so you can't "get back" to where you were (either that or else keep
> the about/authors/license bar always there so the user may go back to those
> entries)
> - licensing tab should have the LGPL 2.1 also added to it as well as the BSD
> license which is used in some of our code
>
> --
> Aaron J. Seigo
> humru othro a kohnu se
> GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
>
> KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
>
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