secondary window titles

[Eike Hein]

Benjamin Meyer wrote:
> Perhaps we might not have to subclass some dialogs from Qt just to set the 
> caption, but consistency is the biggest reason especially sense we want to 
> start launching our applications in OS X and windows.

Many of us don't. This hints at a larger issue, which
I personally fear - diluting the conventions and best
practices of the KDE platform by adding the overhead
of adhering to foreign, closed platforms' conventions
and interoperating with their facilities. That's a
pretty dangerous path to go down, looking at apps like
OpenOffice and Firefox and their integration issues on
basically all platforms they try to support.

IMHO, the primary platform of a KDE application is the
KDE Desktop Environment and its own set of conventions
and best practices, and the only concern is to be in-
ternally consistent with regards to that. Thus whether
to add the application name to dialog window captions
should be argued about on the level whether it makes
sense to have the app name there or not for a user of
the KDE desktop, and not how it looks on Windows or
Mac OS X (or we can tell the KDE4 HIG team to go home
right now).

The question it comes down to is what the overriding
agenda of the KDE project is: to develop a free desk-
top environment/ecosystem, or to turn kdelibs into
a library for cross-platform application development.
This may sound overly dramatic in the context of
something as simple as window captions, but we're
going to face this question again and again in the
not too far future, and the two are in conflict.


Stepping down from my soapbox, I think having the
app name in dialog window captions does make sense
for the odd non-modal dialog, and possibly for some
of the fancier window management scenarios we may
encounter in the future, such as the Beryl/compiz
mode that temporarily moves and scales all windows
to not overlap, and presumably displays the window
caption on hovering one of those thumbnails[1].

Conversely, I don't see how having the app name in
the caption incurs any penalty.


1 = Ironically, that is lifted from Mac OS X:
    http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/expose/


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