Dolphin for Plasma Next?

[Frank Reininghaus]

Hi,

2014-02-18 14:45 GMT+01:00 Jens Reuterberg:
>> Could you elaborate on what sorts of things you want to discuss? I
>> understand that your group is working on ideas for the future look of
>> the KDE/Plasma desktop (whatever the final name will be), including
>> the applications. However, most of what you can see in Dolphin's UI is
>> provided by the styles and by widgets from kdelibs (or frameworks, in
>> the future), and I think that this should not change - consistency
>> with other KDE applications is very important IMHO. So anything that
>> you want to change about Dolphin's look would probably apply to other
>> applications as well, right?
>
>
> That is the plan - the way changes will happen is kinda in the hands of the
> Plasma Devs and not us so we want to talk to all the "basic applications in
> the desktop" people one-on-one and then sketch up ideas, get them past the
> HIG-gang to get intput and changes and then throw it past you again.
>
> The issue is that Dolphin has plenty of fiddly details that could be changed
> to better fit the style but also the HIG guidelines

OK, thanks for the clarification. I misunderstood the point of your
group then - I thought that the "Visual Design Group" is mostly about
icon themes, widget styles and similar things, and not about
usability.

If there are parts of Dolphin which are not conforming to the HIG,
feel free to tell us about them, and we can talk about how these
issues can be addressed. If there is a forum discussion about a
particular HIG issue now or in the future, you can share a link on
this mailing list to give us an opportunity to have a look and comment
on it if appropriate.

> But there are some ideas cropping up for you guys and Kmail and other "basic
> applications" that might be good to pass by you.

I apologize if what I'm going to say now will appear overly hesitant
or negative, but after some rather frustrating experiences in the
past, I think it needs to be said in order to prevent possible
misunderstandings and maybe disappointment in the future.

There is a *huge* mismatch between what the people who work on
Dolphin's code, in particular myself, can do, and what some others
expect them to do. I only spend a few hours per week in front of my
development machine, and I try to spend some minutes on answering some
e-mails, bug reports and review requests whenever I find the time.
Needless to say, this is barely sufficient to work on the things that
I consider somewhat urgent, and finding the time to work on
large-scale changes that are proposed by others is rather challenging.

I think it's cool if people discuss ideas how Dolphin can be improved,
but I would appreciate it if they were aware of two things:

(a) Even if everyone agrees that an idea is cool, there is no
guarantee that anyone who currently works on Dolphin will be able to
implement it.

(b) Not every idea that looks good at first sight is suitable for
inclusion in Dolphin. For example, a change might make life easier for
some users, but seriously harm the usability for others. Or it would
require that a lot of code is changed, which means that there will
most likely be new bugs, and maybe it will make future code
maintenance harder. It could also be that nothing can be done in
Dolphin to change a certain behavior because a library that Dolphin
depends on causes it.

We get a lot of ideas from users already at bugs.kde.org, and many of
them belong to category (b). Most of the time, this is not because of
anything related to code, but because it is obvious to someone who has
spent a few years learning a lot about the many different ways in
which an application is used regularly that the idea will cause
serious trouble for many users. In the past, I have often replied to
these ideas and pointed out why they might not be suitable for Dolphin
because I felt that users who took the time to describe their ideas
deserve that they get some kind of feedback. I was willing to accept
that writing these replies is quite time-consuming and has no positive
effect for Dolphin's users (except maybe for the user who filed the
report). However, "Thanks for your idea, but I think that..." is
usually not what the reporter wants to hear, and the inappropriate
responses that came from a small subgroup of all reporters were so
harmful for my motivation to spend any spare time on Dolphin that I
have recently decided not to comment on such "category (b)" ideas at
bugs.kde.org any more.

Sorry again if this sounds too negative, but I wanted to make it clear
why I have an uneasy feeling about encouraging others to "pass ideas
by us".

I think the best solution would be to simply send links to forum
discussions about these ideas to this mailing list, provided the ideas
found some support, and no obvious flaws could be found. I will try to
provide some feedback in the forum then, and other readers of this
list might also share their opinion. Inappropriate reactions are
hopefully less likely in such a public place than in a wishlist report
at bugs.kde.org (which is often a one on one conversation between the
reporter and the maintainer or a core developer).

> The issue with a mailing list is that most of us don't use them - a majority
> hold the fort in a google plus group and a private forum - so the back and
> forth may be a tad trickier depending on reactions to mockups.

As I said, if there is a Dolphin-specific discussion in the forum,
feel free to share a link on this mailing list (I hope you mean the
KDE forum and not a really "private" forum).

Thanks,
Frank