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

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On March 19, 2010, Reinhold Kainhofer wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 16. März 2010 20:53:35 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> A while ago you wrote on your blog (unfortunately, I can't find it now)
> something to the effect that people need to get on with new developments
> and designs and not stick to the old ones

we shouldn't remain wedded to existing ideas simply because they exist. we 
don't need to get rid of all existing ideas and replace everything, but we 
should not be afraid to replace that which is not good. we very often put a 
high degree of value on poor or even bad ideas simply because they are already 
there, not because they are good or useful. it's also important, imho, to 
remember that the definition of "good" and "useful" change over time.

when the first Mac was released, one could indeed show all their files on the 
screen at once. destop icons made all the sense in the world at that point.

today you'd need a screen the size of a large battleship to do the same (i 
have some 1.5 million files in my user's home directory; just did a filelight 
scan the other day to clean some of that stuff up).

so things change. and not just along the "acceptable prettyness" scale.

> Maybe I really belong to a dying species who think that a computer should
> be a tool that supports your work and not distract. Just making something
> shiny might distract from the fact that something is annoying, but doesn't
> solve the problem.

this wasn't a case of just making something shiny. a vertical list doesn't 
work well in any of the form factors other than "to a panel" that i listed. if 
the new strip is shiny, then we did someting else that was good. but that 
wasn't the main motivation there.

> Sometimes I really have the feeling that many aspects
> of plasma are only about making an interface that looks great and shiny
> and awesome, but adds distractions, annoyances and inconsistencies in many
> places.

seeing as you can configure plasma quite easily to be a nearly 100% pixel 
perfect mimic of kicker + kdesktop, this is pretty much untrue. if you don't 
like the new notifications, for instance (and we are continuing to work on 
improving them, btw), then turn it off in the system tray settings. then you 
get the uglier and just as distracting and annoying blocks on screen that we 
had in kde3 :)

there are only two things i'm aware of in plasma-desktop that can't be 
"reverted" back to kde3 loveliness (different wallpaper per desktop without 
per-virtual-desktop-views and manual hiding buttons; the latter is actually 
being worked on as well)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
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KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks