KDE's Plasma: How not to do lists...

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

Hi all,
First of all, sorry for not replying earlier, but I have had a really busy 
week and couldn't find the time before (actually, I should also start studying 
the football rules for tomorrows game right now...). 

Am Mittwoch, 17. März 2010 04:40:03 schrieb Sebastian Kügler:
> I think it's also a pity that instead of engaging in a discussion [...], you
> just toned down (I guess, didn't read the original entry you deleted). 

No, I didn't tone down. I don't think my first blog was aggressive or 
anything. It was just that Aaron was right: I didn't talk you first about the 
inconsistencies in plasma how some lists are displayed (and some usability 
problems, like marking the currently selected entry of a list like a button, 
althouth it is the only entry that can't be clicked!) So, I removed it from 
the developers blog and will take the discussion here. 
If you are interested, I copied the old article to my webpage (actually the 
version, which I still building, so it's not publically linked yet anyway):
http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/joomla/reinholds-blog/15-diverses/26-kdes-
plasma-how-not-to-do-lists.html

I have several other issues(rather small, but sometimes also annoying and 
embarassing, like the mail notifications popping up when you are doing a full 
screeen presentation with acroread in front of 180 actuaries...), so I'll try 
to send a list to this mailing list for discussion, when I find the time.


> how to
> fix the issues (or just straight sit down and fix them, most problems
> you're writing about seem rather papercuts than serious issues)

I don't know how you use KDE, but here in an office environment, printing and 
having a wlan connection is just as important and fundamental to me as writing 
emails or browsing the web or writing articles in LaTeX. So, these to are 
really crucial issues. I still use okular, though, since acroread doesn't 
automatically reload changed pdfs (but then, to print I have to start up 
acroread...).

So, to me, a PDF viewer that is unable to print landscape slides in 2-up or 4-
up is not usable, since I typically have to print such slides on average about 
2 times a week (to hand them out to the students as handouts for seminar or 
course presentations).

Similarly, while printing seminar works as booklets is just so much more 
convenient than normal 2-up, for printing pocket scores for my music 
publishing business (which I'm trying to build up right now!) this is crucial. 
I need that even more often than printing landscape slides 2-up.

And about VPN connections: Here at our university all employees using WLAN 
need to use a VPN connection (or authenticate every two hours or so on a web 
page, which rules this kind of connections out). KNetworkManager allows you to 
set up a VPN connection, but doesn't do anything if you click on it (at least  
a few weeks ago, I have to admit I haven't tested this with 4.4.1 yet).

Konqueror printing (which I have to admit was really mostly fixed in KDE 
4.4.1, which was't installed yet last week when I last tried printing and 
wasted ~25 pages of paper trying to print one single page) doesn't really need 
any explanation. If you have ever booked anything online or looked up a train 
schedule or organized a workshop, you realize that printing a web page is 
important, espacially in a business context...

Similarly, I don't think any mail client loosing your mail once or twice a 
year (or your calendar application erasing half you calendar once a year, or 
randomly not applying the changes that you do in the application) needs an 
explanation. But that's off-topic for this list.



> Leads me to believe that the intention is to do a public rant, not to
> actually improve things, which makes me sad. We should deal differently with
> each other.

Sorry, but I just don't have enough time any more for KDE development. 
And those issues that I wrote in my modified entry were really discussed with 
maintainers. The printing issues and the bluetooth were mostly answered "we 
can't do anything about this, the underlying system (phonon or qprinter) don't 
support this or that..." While as a developer I understand that it's easiest 
to blame the underlying library that some crucial feature is not available or 
buggy (and thus some annoying workaround is needed), as a user, I simply want 
the applications I use to work. I don't really care whose fault is it that 
something doesn't work. In particular, since these were things that worked in 
kde 3.x.

Cheers,
Reinhold

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhold Kainhofer, reinhold at kainhofer.com, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial & Actuarial Math., Vienna Univ. of Technology, Austria
 * http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/, DVR: 0005886
 * LilyPond, Music typesetting, http://www.lilypond.org