KDevelop4 UI

[David Nolden]

Am Montag 21 Dezember 2009 22:38:01 schrieb Alexander Dymo:
> понеділок, 21-гру-2009 19:08:48 David Nolden ви написали:
> > Even KMail has a "File" menu entry, how broken
> >  is that? I never know where to search for a specific function.
> 
> Just to reinstate, that there're good reasons for starting the menu with
>  File:
> 
> 1)  99.99999% of other apps start their menus from "File"
> 	- all IDE's and even Emacs
> 	- newcommers will actually get lost because they will expect
> 	- existing users will be irritated, because KDevelop won't look/work
> 	like other apps
> 2) "File" menu _does_ make a lot of sense to KDevelop. After all, what you
>  do most of the time is opening, editing and closing files. Only once or
>  twice per day you have to open project (and I prefer the system to do that
>  automatically by restoring the session on startup).

At least me I nearly never use the "File" menu for anything, and I suspect for 
most people using KDevelop it's the same. You open files through quickopen or 
through the project view, people will more often change the session than they 
manually open a file through the file menu (Ok, this needs some testing, but I 
think that's the case).

Also I've taken a look through several KDE apps, and I was shocked that even 
"Dolphin" and "Konsole" had a "File" menu, both contain menu entries that have 
exactly _nothing_ to do with any kind of files. The only app breaking this 
broken convention seems to be amarok, they have given the entry the name 
"Amarok", which of course is better than "File", except that it should really 
be called "Playback" because that's what it contains. But it seems like they 
live fine with it.

Anyway, we wouldn't 'remove' that entry, we would just move a seldomly used 
main-menu entry somewhat to the right. I think it's not that frustrating to 
move the mouse a little more to the right when needing that menu. In my 
experience it's only frustrating when you know how something works, know that 
it's there, but cannot find it. You've got to be really blind to not find 
this, you will even recognize the pattern without focusing it with your eyes.

> PS: believe me, I've been developing a single commercial app for almost 4
> years now. And I've learned point #1 the hard way (i.e. lost some money).
> 
> People just don't like changes when they already have expectations on how
> things should work.
> Area tabs and especially workingset buttons may work because people just
>  don't have enough prior knowledge or analogies. They will either ignore
>  those elements or learn to use them or blame us (like one person already
>  did).
You cannot please everyone. But since KDevelop4 has no customer base at all, 
we don't have to be all that frightened. ;-) And unlike some other projects, 
we will react when many people complain.

Greetings, David