Use of library names (Akonadi, Solid, Nepomuk, Phonon etc.) in user interfaces

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday 07 June 2008, Tom Albers wrote:
> > Names for some "behind the scenes" KDE libraries/daemons are creeping
> > into user interfaces.
>
> Which is good. We spent a lot of time investing in promoting those words,
> and the user should see them in the interface too, to actually identify
> that we are not about words, but actually implemented stuff.

> Nepomuk is the big example. No-one understands what it is. Even when you
> are actually tagging in dolphin, you have no clue, you are using nepomuk.
> Which is bad. If you want it to be a bigger success, users should be
> confronted with it.

Well, developers should be confronted with it and users should be hinted at 
about it. Apple's Spotlight is the closest we can get to this really and every 
mac user i've introduced it to (yes, many don't know it exists!) always asks, 
"what is that?" and then i have to say, "search tool for your computer"; while 
that's unfortunate, a lot of people know the term "Spotlight" and it's nicely 
googleable.

So.. what I'm getting at is that we probably shouldn't have an entry in the 
control panels listing that says "Nepomuk". Rather it should probably be 
something along the lines of what Robert suggested.

Inside that panel, however, it would make All The Sense In The World(tm) to 
make mention of Nepomuk prominantly. So while the icon in System Settings 
might be labelled "Desktop Search" or something the header at the top of the 
actual panel when opened might say "Configure the Nepomuk semantic desktop 
search system."

Help and other such documentation should probably also reference it, etc. But 
in the main configuration contact points for the user, we would probably serve 
them better by talking about functionality first.

> We spent a lot of time in promoting the "pilars of KDE", let's please not
> tear them down.

Agreed; but not having an icon named Nepomuk won't do that =)

> > - Users who are not KDE-tech enthusiasts seeing these would be
> > somewhat mystified.  To give an idea of what
> > I mean, imagine how odd it would seem if Apple's next Safari release
> > had an "Enable Squirrelfish" option in its
> > settings to turn JavaScript on/off.
>
> I don't get this point at all. If you want to know, google for it.

This is about 10 steps too late for most users. =/

> > - In System Settings there are modules called "Nepomuk" and "Solid".
> > Again, I worry that many users are not going
> > to have a clue what these are.  For quite a while during the 4.0 cycle
> > the sound setup in System Settings was called "Phonon".
>
> It's all about branding. First we create a hype and then we are going to
> deny those words to be used in the interface?

No, just put them in the "right" places. We've been pretty careful about this 
in Plasma.

-- 
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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