A look at GNOME 2.14, comparison to KDE

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday 20 February 2006 10:54, Janne Ojaniemi wrote:
> http://kde.org/screenshots/images/3.4/snapshot06.png

use a newer kde. some of those bevels and what not are gone. i removed a few 
of them for 3.5. ditto in kontact, ditto in the file dialog. yes, the bevels 
bother me as well, and there's only one way to get away from them: fix the 
code.

some fixes are harder than others since we happen to have a more dynamic set 
of technologies that actually do more. and yes, this has impacts on the UI. 
they are not unfixable, but some require quite a bit of effort to do right.

as a counterballance point, i've heard gnome's "simplicity" described as 
"hollow feeling" and "constructed" by IT managers in Very Large Companies. 
it's not the One True Approach.

> - Konqueror has nine top-level menu's, Nautilus has six

unfortunately, from a usability perspective, simply counting menus says almost 
nothing.

we need to separate out web and file browsing better, but one may find that 
6-vs-9 menus doesn't impact things nearly as much as simply getting rid of 
the lines that separate toolbars. really, try it.

> - Notice the six icons in the sidebar in Konqueror. Nautilus does not have
> them, but they seem to be using a drop-menu instead (the "Informacione").
> Konqueror's implementation presents several UI-elements and makes the UI
> look busy, whereas Nautilus's implementation has only one UI-element
> visible, making the UI less cluttered.

just remember that the goal is not to make an uncluttered UI. it's to make a 
usable UI that doesn't scream at the user, so to speak. it is widely agreed 
that konqueror is a far better file manager than pretty much anything out 
there, nautilus especially.

> KDE has a lot of work ahead of it.

and that's why we're all still here.

> A lot. I'm really looking forward to 
> KDE4, and I really, really hope that it delivers on this front. I would
> guess that UI-changes like this are relatively easy to do, but for some
> reason I feel that changes like these are the ones that would face the most
> opposition...

why?

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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