kwin default window button order.

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 22 November 2007, Sven Burmeister wrote:
> most people I know

gurk.

a) 'most people i know' does not a usability argument make. few things are as 
annoying as the 'most people i know' comments because everyone knows a 
different set of people and there is variance between those sets with none of 
them being representative (unless you really know a hell of a lot of people 
in a lot of different peer groups and pay attention to all of their computer 
behaviour, making it representative)

b) most people do what they've learned given the options available and the 
teaching they received. it says almost nothing about how good the tool or the 
teacher is. if we simply write to what people do now, we will seriouesly 
impair any progress towards "better".

the question is if that matters at all, i suppose. i'd suggest that since 
everyone else's software is also a moving target, practicing "write primarily 
to what people do today" will end up with kde being attractive to an ever 
diminishing group of people who used computers between 1984 and 200x. but 
that's not actually accurate:

truth be told, kde does change ... but it's usually reactive to some other 
desktop software introducing that feature first. so it's ok for them to 
change and try things, but not us; however, once they try something, then 
it's good enough fo rus. interesting; why not simply do some things that make 
more sense *before* them in the first place? you know, when it occurs to us 
to do it? obviously we won't have every idea first, but sometimes we do. the 
times when we've actually gone ahead and done that, it's worked out more 
often than not. we should practice care and not become a crazy bag of 
experiments, but we're hardly in danger of becoming anything near that any 
time soon at the current pace of thinking.

yeah, this goes to the core of what i dislike about attitudes in free software 
desktop development when it comes to user interface.

-- 
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 Trolltech
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