A forward look at KDE4 (was: "A look at GNOME 2.14...")

[Kurt Pfeifle]

On Wednesday 22 February 2006 17:13, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Wednesday 22 February 2006 09:47, Janne Ojaniemi wrote:

> some who aren't 
> overly gifted on the coding front have done things like added WhatsThis help 
> to applications (i wrote an article on how to do that a couple years ago, 

For a reference -- it is still available (and valuable) here:

   http://urbanlizard.com/~aseigo/whatsthis_tutorial/

> and  
> several people took up the challenge 

Yes, like I did   :)

> quite successfully!)...

The result of which you can see in the "WhatsThis"-completeness of kprinter
and its sub-dialogs now.

> there are always   
> ways to get involved and help move things forward.

If you want to get your hands dirty with WhatsThis for KDE4, you can start
with reading and discussing what OpenUsability.org people made as an initial
suggestion to implement for KDE4:

   http://www.userbrain.de/whatsthis/ideas_whatsthis_january06_v1.3.pdf

The great thing is that you *can* be involved in a very early stage here
where it is not yet even possible to write code: because it is still in its
early design stage, and you can be part of helping to create a new kind of
interactive help system that benefits users (and makes it *much more easy*
to write+contribute WhatsThis content than it was when Aaron wrote his
ancient tutorial). 

> even if they aren't always  
> your ideas you are moving forward, by getting involved with the project your 
> ideas actually have a better chance of finding their way into things.
> 
> and of course, there is the possibility that you could learn to code, if 
> that's something of interest to you. many have done exactly that, and it's 
> not actually all that difficult. in fact, i believe Scribus was started by a 
> fellow who taught himself C++ as he went because he really, really wanted a 
> good DTP app =)

That's true.

Franz learned Qt and C++ while and as he started to code Scribus. 
(Though he wasn't a complete non-coder -- he somehow comes from a 
Fortran background, IIRC; but he isn't a programmer by trade either...)

> > And my help does not include patches. Does it mean that my help is less
> > appreciated?
> 
> no, not less appreciated. it just takes a lot longer to turn into reality, and 
> people who turn ideas into reality have the most value to the user base. 

I liked your "bronze -- silver -- gold" thingie a lot :)

Cheers,
Kurt