More storytelling

[Michael Rudolph]

On Sunday 13 July 2008 12:06:20 Marco Martin wrote:
> On Saturday 12 July 2008, Michael Rudolph wrote:
> > Good news everyone,
> >
> > there are more stories. I just updated techbase with a new usage
> > scenario (Writing an article).
> >
> > If you want to read it, find it here:
> > http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Plasma/TheWaysOfThePlasma#Writing_
> >an_artic le
> >
> > If you want to see it, (be warned, that last time my mockups
> > hindered understanding more, than they helped it), go here:
> > http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelrudolph/sets/72157606122319905/
> >
> > I don't know how the timing fits with the current release schedule,
> > but I figured, since you are busy everytime anyway, I could as well
> > post it just now.
> >
> > Please comment!
>
> i can't find much to comment, it's really well done,
> on the long term i agree that should become something like this, at
> least thinking about it now.
> probably evolving when the parts slowly come together will become
> something even different that now we aren't thinking about, but
> that's another story :) an important thing i think for the short term
> is to offer a path for this change as smooth as possible to avoid as
> much as possible a storm like these days, so the old 90s desktop to
> be available, but very easy to escape from that and less appealing to
> working on that, booh, something like this :)
>
> Cheers,
> Marco Martin

Hello everyone,

thanks Riccardo, and thanks Marco for the feedback.

I think you are right in pointing out, that we need to think about a 
transition path from the current desktop to a better one.

I want to write some more stories for the ways of the plasma, but since 
I'm not feeling very creative right now, I'll skip these for the time 
being and start with the next part. In this part I'd like to discuss 
some architectural aspects of plasma and what concepts help make the 
presented scenarios the Right Thing(tm) or at least be closer to the 
Right Thing(tm) than current interfaces.

I think talking about these concepts (not just writing them down on 
techbase, but discussing them, disagreeing about them and even blogging 
about them) will raise awareness among community members and eventually 
bring about better design. A little like HIGs and PIGs make it easier 
to just point to some rules or guidelines in a discussion. A whole 
community aware of the fundamental concepts of user interface design 
will quite naturally create better software and also do this much 
faster than we might imagine.

Of course I'd like to hear if you disagree; and especially when the next 
part is up, I hope we can discuss this a little, but for that to 
happen, I will first have to write it. :-)

michael