A look at GNOME 2.14, comparison to KDE

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday 20 February 2006 14:54, Iñaki wrote:
> El Lunes, 20 de Febrero de 2006 22:21, Aaron J. Seigo escribió:
> > > and the "Services" tab with
> > > Fonts and Printers information??
> >
> > people actually find this useful.
>
> Not the people I know.

this is the exact trap i'm hoping to help avoid in kde.

it doesn't matter if the people you know don't find it useful. what matters is 
that *someone* found it useful. so before changing it, go find out *why* they 
found it useful.

perhaps you are right that this was put there just because the control center 
isn't fast/usable enough in kde4. perhaps not. provenance of features can be 
very enlightening because knowing why they appeared often helps figure out a 
better way to present that feature set, and often the reason we guess is the 
reason is not. sometimes it is simply a matter of "someone thought it might 
be useful to someone so slapped it in there", but often it's not.

as it happens, the fonts entry is there in an attempt to reveal the fact that 
we have a fonts:/ URL that allows one to (un)install fonts using drag and 
drop from a virtual "fonts" folder. few were finding the fonts:/ url (among 
others), so someone (i forget who exactly) decided to expose them in the 
sidebar to make them discoverable. fonts:/ is highly useful and more 
"natural" for many users than a dialog driven installation.

for years we've dealt with the issue of people trying to change things without 
bothering to understand why they are the way they are in the kde usability 
project, and the only workable solution we found was to discover the 
provenance of the feature. usually this means speaking with the developer(s). 
if we don't do this we end up pissing off both users and developers (neither 
is good) and losing years of hard-won wisdom. often the reason for the 
feature is valid, but the implementation needs works.

but people often want to trim "fat" simply because they can trim it, not 
because it actually improves anything in real world usage. or, as i like to 
call it, "fantasy usability".

in the case of fonts:/, your control center argument is completely irrelevant 
given the point and purpose of the font entry in the services tab. you'd only 
know this, of course, by doing some research into where that feature came 
from. this is the "work" part of "usability work" ;)

the services tab is an interesting example. if the services tab is actually 
useful and should be kept[1], then does having two more entries there really 
affect the overall usability of that tab? in this particular case, probably 
not.

[1] personally i think it could be presented in a different manner to greater 
effect. it's attempting to reveal various services in kde that users 
otherwise wouldn't know about, since random URL protocols such as fonts:/ are 
hard to find for most users. but could this same revealing be done in a 
different manner?

-- 
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)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-quality/attachments/20060221/45e10c27/attachment.pgp