Plasma in kde 4.2: let's make it perfect for my mother and girlfriend. :-)

[Giovanni Masucci]

Hello to everyone. I just want to share the experience that my family had with 
plasma (using opensuse 4.2 packages). I asked them to test it for about a week 
to get some feedback from "normal" user. My mother is a windows user not very 
skilled with computers, my gf used kde3 and it's now enjoying gnome.
I asket to my mother to test a "classical desktop" configuration  (we used a 
folderview-as-desktop-activity), while my girlfriend used a default kde4 
desktop with 2 folderviews (desktop folder, home).
Overall the experience has been great (except some bugs that  were expected 
since we were using a pre-beta version of 4.2).
Anyway a few usability issues came out and I tought it would have been nice to 
share them with you plasma devs:
Adding programs icons to the panel: At the moment the user can right-click on 
the program in the kickoff menù and select the  "add to the panel" option. You 
can also drag and drop it to the panel. However the ability to add a program 
by right clicking on the panel and select "add a program" has gone. Kicker 
used to had these feature and gnome has too. This way it's hard for the user 
to add a program that is not listed in the kickoff menu. Another thing (IMHO) 
to correct is the fact that with the classical menu you can only drag and drop 
into the panel (or into the desktop). Right click launches the program. This 
is not consistent with kickoff behaviour. Also drag and drop is not something 
every user knows...my mother for example had problems with it. 
Next is an issue with folderview as a desktop activity: 
if you right click (on kickoff menu, since in classical right click is not 
working as we have seen) on a program and select "add to the desktop" you will 
not have a folderview icon, but a "plasmoid icon". I don't know if these 
plasmoid icons are still useful at all (from what I understood they should now 
be deprecated in favor of folderview icons). The fact is that they should not 
exist, at least on a folderview fullscreen activity. 
My mother, who has problems with drag and drop tried to right click on a 
classical menu icon...and it did not work! So she went to kickoff and tried 
again with right click → add to the desktop. An icon was added but it was 
different and behaved different from the other (diffent size, different way to 
resize it, diffent way to erase it and move it, no possibility to sort it with 
the others etc.). So I think that plasmoid icons should not be used anymore, 
at lest in FV fullscreen activities. These "plasmoid icons" are created also 
when dragging something from the panel to the desktop.
Last issue:  this comes from me and it's more a graphical glitch. In kde4.1 
when clicking on a plasmoid like the device manager or the calendar I got the 
right popup with the black border of the oxygen plasma theme. in kde 4.2 
kickoff, the device manager, the battery applet and the calendar give me a 
white square that gets filled with the normal content about half-1 second 
after it appears. This is just a minor annoyance, but it gives a "slow and 
sluggish" feeling to the experience and is present in all the 3 computers I 
have tried (intel drivers, desktop effects on/off, opensuse, kubuntu and self 
compiled binaries.). Until some weeks ago the device manager was the only one 
unaffected, now it's like the others...

I don't want to sound arrogant or critical, I'm loving kde 4 and I just wanted 
to share my experience and the experience that my family had with it. Kde 4.2 
is REALLY awsome and it's going to rock. :)
Thanks for it.