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

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday 17 November 2008, Giovanni Masucci wrote:
> Il lunedì 17 novembre 2008 20:34:46 Aaron J. Seigo ha scritto:
> > On Monday 17 November 2008, Giovanni Masucci wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> > what application that was not in the menu did your two test users try and
> > add?
>
> Vplanner (scuba dive planning program), it's basically a tar.gz that you
> untar and launch.

so we expect people to be able to untar and launch things they download, but 
not drag an icon from the file manager to the panel?

> > think you did a huge diservice to your test subject by making them use
> > the menu style launcher when that's really not suited to new users nor
> > the default configuraiton of plasma. it seems you figured "oh, she knows
> > other systems, so let's make this exactly like them" and then tested
> > that, which is really not how plasma ships nor is meant to be used.
>
> mmm...well it was a test. We didn't use the configuration we wanted to use,
> we compared the default one with the nostalgic one that is for sure not our
> favorite, but still some people might want to use it.We tried to different
> use cases. If a user coming from win/kde3/gnome would come to me asking 
> "what plasma config should I use?", i'd say the default one. But here we
> were testing different use cases.,. That's why we have been testing a
> pre-beta version of kde: to help to give a polished experience to everybody
> using kde 4,

and that's appreciated. but yes, please test the defaults. the "traditional 
desktop" is a nice thing to have to offer people, but it's really not something 
i feel is important enough to focus on polishing to be as perfect as the 
defaults.

> regardless if they want a desktop similar to xp or a new
> generation one. I tought this was one the points of  4.2, since a lot of
> users that tried 4.1 sayied they wanted their old desktop back.

and when they do so, they can put up with all the annoyances that come with 
it. i'm really not interested in pouring tons of resources into making a 
compatibility mode that works not just exactly like it used to but also 
better. we have much, much better things to do with our time and energy.

and honestly, people have battered us about the head so much about the "oh 
nos! where's my traditional desktop you asshats!" that if you look at the 
default plasma .. well .. it's pretty uninspiring from the perspective of 
being a better, different thing. it's basically the old thing with a few 
tweaks.

and i'm highly dissapointed because of that. with 4.2 we've given people a 
rather traditional experience option, a mostly-traditional one .. and we're 
done with that.

4.3 and on we need to be looking at significant improvement and new ideas to 
offer. people who don't want that can continue to use the configuration we offer 
now but they must not be allowed to slow us down further.

> > > 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).
> >
> > you understood incorrectly.
> >
> :( ok, sorry. Misunderstood again...i

it's quite simple: how do you put an application launcher in amongst a bunch 
of widgets?

and with an icon applet we can actually allow things like:

* making launchers you use more often bigger
* auto-deleting launcher when the app they are related to goes away.

--
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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