[Nepomuk] Nepomuk 4.11 Roadmap

[Frank Reininghaus]

Hi Heiko, hi everyone,

2013/2/28 Heiko Tietze <heiko.tietze at user-prompt.com>:
> Hi all,
>
> to go ahead with the discussion on Dolphin's sidebar we prepared a blog
> article what we want to do next. Please discuss the aim of the planned study
> with us.
>
> http://user-prompt.com/quo-vadis-dolphin-preparation-of-the-developer-study/

thanks for this post!

Concerning the "current ideas and feelings" of the developers, I can
only speak for myself, and not for the others who contribute to
Dolphin.

1. I would say that the Personas are still valid.

2. About the purpose of the "Places" panel (I guess you mean mainly
this one when you talk about "sidebars"), I would say that it should
help users to quickly go to frequently needed locations. Besides those
that they can configure themselves and which are shown in the top
section of the panel, this includes storage devices (internal or
removable) which are accessible, and Nepomuk-searches, e.g., for
recently accessed files.

The "Places" which are configurable and the links to the storage
devices are shared with the "File Open/Save" dialog and have been
there for quite some time. The searches have been added in Dolphin
2.1/KDE 4.9 by the former maintainer Peter Penz. I don't know if he
did some usability research before that. It seems to me that the
search for recently accessed items is being used by a considerable
number of users - at least we did get quite a few bug reports related
to that. From a developer's point of view, this is the most reliable
indicator that people use the functionality ;-) I'm less sure about
the searches for Documents/Images/etc., I did not get much feedback
about that.

3. About developers' feature ideas and "Where do the developers want
Dolphin to go?": I took over Dolphin's maintainership in the mid of
last year when Peter left. I think I was the most active contributor
except for himself during the last years, which is probably the reason
why he asked me to take over. Unfortunately, I don't really have much
free time to work on Dolphin, which means that I cannot spend much
time working on new features, considering that handling at least a
part of the endless stream of incoming bug reports, patch review and
discussions on mailing lists and in the forum are quite time-consuming
(but also very important) tasks. My main goals are currently to make
continuous small improvements by fixing bugs and little annoyances and
to make it attractive for others to work on Dolphin, because I believe
that a large group of contributors is the best way to secure the
project's future.

I hope that this answers some questions - other contributors might add
their own ideas and views. Feel free to ask if anything is unclear!

Best regards,
Frank