[kde-edu]: GUI policies and styles

[CPH]

On Monday 17 January 2005 14:47, Anne-Marie Mahfouf wrote:
> 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

Hi Anne-Marie 

> well, this is what we were trying to do since the beginning. But it's
> easily said and not easily done. 
I understand completely.

> 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.
The resolution we hope to use are 1024x7. 
As for which app to improve, it was a general comment that the apps shoudl 
really have a more consistent look & feel, and that it should be very child 
friendly. For example have a look at http://childsplay.sf.net or gcompris.

> big font: I had a bigFont() method added in kdelibs but this depends also
> of the distribution. We cannot hard-code fonts. 
Agreed, but maybe there could be a common rc file used by kdeedu modules which 
would contain information such as which icon set, font, and font sizes for 
Big, Medium, and Small.

> 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.
I'm really only starting to deploy KDE based apps to users, but I will bring 
feedback as soon as possible.

> 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...

Ok, this I can understand. 

Hopefully  the feedback I will bring back will be of some use and maybe I will 
also get a chance to help with the programming side of things.

CPH