[kde-edu]: GUI policies and styles

[Anne-Marie Mahfouf]

On January 17, 2005 06:37 am, CPH wrote:
> Hi,
>   I've not been tracking this part of KDE for long but am involved with
> putting software on school PCs. One thing I have noticed about the
> interfaces for many of the KDE apps is that those focused at young children
> is that the interfaces do not seem to maintain a reasonably common
> interface. For many of the Windows based edu packages I've seen they seem
> to take over the full screen, it may also be a good idea to have themes
> aimed at various levels (e.g. full screen + big fonts + cartoonish look for
> pre-7 year olds + a small number of big buttons, big fonts + cartoonish
> look for 7-10 year olds, cartoonish look for 10-12 year olds).
>
> It may be a good idea to pull some ideas together and from that put a
> framework together which all relevant KDE edu apps can then use to
> implement whatever policies seem appropriate.
>
> CPH

well, this is what we were trying to do since the beginning. But it's easily 
said and not easily done. For example, KHangMan full window mode is only nice 
on low res monitor but on all current resolutions it looks awful. Please 
elaborate on what resolution you use at school and what app could be 
improved.
big font: I had a bigFont() method added in kdelibs but this depends also of 
the distribution. We cannot hard-code fonts. However when I downloaded the 
chalk font Danny want to use I saw that KDE now has a neat font installer so 
including a font in a package should be possible, provided the font is free. 
Again here it would be good if you indicate exactly what you would like to 
see and what neat free font we can use.
cartoonish look + themes: that was the idea all along (see KLettres which 
hides the menubar in kid look) but we had few artists interested at the 
beginning. Now that's changing with Danny'sinvolvement and a strong KDE-Look 
& artists team. The svg background he made for KMessedWords and the other 
mockups he drew are all wonderful. But the coding part is not so easy...

Anne-Marie