[KPhotoAlbum] order criteria for a family photo collection

[jedd]

On Wednesday 21 February 2007 12:00 am, Heinz Kohl wrote:
 ] So I tried the KPA demo - and to my surprise I saw Fig. 2.3 working like I had 
 ] expected it had to work ...

 I think this was (amongst other things) pretty much what many of
 us were suggesting you do prior, and during, your recent spate of
 'KPA Doesn't Work Properly' emails to the list.

 Please keep playing with it.  It is not as broken as you seem to
 think it is.  At least, the rest of us don't think so.  It's possible
 we're all missing something that you're not -- but statistics aren't
 on your side with that type of claim.

 ] - it has to be possible to use modern window programs without any knowledge of 
 ] the system behind
 ...
 ] 99.9% of all computer programs have to be written for pure amateurs.

 This is, of course, 100% bollocks.

 If you want to write programmes that target the Dumbest Common
 Denominator, then you are necessarily going to have programs that
 fail to perform any usefully sophisticated task.

 The discerning will always be at a disadvantage, but I don't think
 we should embrace that attitude with such gusto.

 It's like claiming that you should only write (in English, say) with
 words that are less than 10 characters long and have less than three
 syllables.  Yes, it's possible (maybe) but is it effective?

 By limiting the language you are limiting the manner in which people
 can think (because most people think in terms of their language).

 Similarly, by limiting the sophistication of a computer program you
 are limiting the ways that people can utilise their computer.  For
 people who have the ability to mentally abstract things, this will
 be particularly frustrating.

 Catering to the peanut gallery might be okay if you're the Microsofts
 of the world, where your well-being is predicated on the existence
 of lots of wealthy but fundamentally lazy / stupid people.  Happily
 for KPA (and many other applications written by similarly dedicated,
 thoughtful, altruistic (dare I say) and skilled people) that approach
 hasn't been applied to the rest of the IT world.  A certain amount
 of intelligence and inquisitiveness has been assumed.

 Elsewhere you wrote:

 ]    And every user has to learn to distinguish between these time categories 
 ] and the KPA time, even in the lucky case, when he was knowing 'the picture 
 ] was taken 30.10.1943', had not found the picture in the category 
 ] 'Allerseelen', and I 'may have been taken perhaps in 1939-1945, I'm sure, 
 ] late in october or in the first november days'.
 ] It could be worse.
 ] I could have seen 30.10., marked Allerseelen, only the picture is showing 
 ] 18:30, I had estimated the year to 1936 to 1941, and he could look for 1943, 
 ] late october, 18 o'clock.

 This sounds to me more like a problem with the accuracy of your
 data (and/or the expectation of accuracy of subsequent users of
 your data) than of the application (KPA).

 If you are confident the time was between 36-41 .. then the fault
 lies with the second user, who is looking in the wrong place - and
 no matter what facilities they use, if they're looking in the wrong
 place they won't find the right data.

 If you are not confident the time was between 36-41 .. then fault
 lies with you for asserting those times in the first place.  If you
 believe the file could exist any time between 33-43, then you should
 use those parameters in the first instance and be done with it.

 I think those of us who have accurate time-stamps would be very
 annoyed if KPA kept on making our carefully-entered date information
 fuzzier and fuzzier in order to fit more and more searches.

 Elsewhere you wrote:

 ] If avoidable, I'm also tired in using such prehistoric technics. Things like
 ] 'Open a command window'
 ] 'Type in stupid text lines including cd, man ...'
 ] 'Read a crazy unstructured man text to remind the parameter values'
 ] 'Type another stupid text, don't forget the & or crash the program when wiping 
 ] the text junk from the window'
 ] 
 ] It's very nice to comply with ancient customs in operating on a command line,
 ] Programs of today should also comply with the customs of today.

 Okay .. if you think using the keyboard is prehistoric, then you should
 probably not be using KDE or even GNU/Linux.  Indeed, you should
 probably stick with MS Media Center or maybe an XBox.

 I don't think that 'cd' is stupid -- but people that do are probably
 just ignorant, ill-adept, or inexperienced.  These aren't the same
 thing as being stupid.

 If you find man pages crazy or unstructured .. then .. you probably
 should stick with other operating systems that don't provide any
 scriptable facilities powerful enough to do two near-identical tasks
 without going through a near-identical sequence of click-a-thons.

 Your customs of today should not be assumed to be where the
 rest of us (who often spend much time at a very contemporary
 CLI prompt) are, or wish to be.

 Oh, and I also am very much looking forward to your prototype.

 cheers,
 Jedd.