[Digikam-users] Closing sidebars?

[Sherwood Botsford]

Ok.  If this is the KDE Way, who am I to disagree?  I don't use KDE
generally.  Certain applications are very good.  I use digikam.  I use
Kmail. I don't use Konquerer, kate, or amorok. But  I use oocalc
mostly because it's so close to excel, that I can use excel help files
to find out how to do something obscure.  For short quick documents I
use abiword.  for longer one's I use FrameMaker -- again because FM
has decent help files, and I've never lost more than a few words when
it has crashed.

Minor points:  I spent half an hour trying to hide it before I posted.
 I've been using computers with a raft of different
OS's for 30 years  I was confused.  Were I involved with the UI of
KDE, I would try to collect encounters from first time users to verify
that what
'everyone is used to' is in fact intuitive.

In some cases they are not intuitive, or at least are not what people
are used to, but they are better.  When I first came to NeXT after
using DOS, one of the
critical hurdles for me to realize that in a mouse world, it's
"Object" -> Verb.  in Dos it's verb -> object.  (you select an object
first, then you say what you want to do versus give a command then the
arguments to it.)

When they aren't obvious to even a small fraction of new users, they
need to be documented early on in the manual.  If it is general to the
system (E.g.
it's the KDE Way, then a pointer from the specific manual to the
general needs to be included.

Further.  I could find no reference to 'close sidebar' in the digikam
manual.  It's these little things that drive people crazy.

In general I think it is a bad idea to have a control have state.
What it does should NOT
depend on what the present state of the thing controlled.  This ads
confusion, and lengthens the learning curve.  Adobe Illustrator has
issues this way:
What you can do with a control on a line depends on this history of
what you have done before on that line, and there is little visible
way to distinguish
state.  This contributes to AI's learning cliff.

(In this case the control HIDES the side bar if the sidebar associated
with the control is showing, but BRINGS UP the sidebar if another
panel is showing.)

This is not intended to start a flame war.  It's one person's
experience with learning a fairly big package.  If this helps you make
digikam, or kde better,
great.  If it even gets the team to take another look at the docs,
great.  If not, then the sun will still rise in the east.






-- 
Sherwood Botsford
Sherwood's Forests
Warburg, Alberta T0C 2T0
http://www.sherwoods-forests.com
780-848-2548