Franz Keferböck

Update: I just found that posting comments was not possible, quickly switched to standard theme to make this possible…

This is a follow-up, i know, but i did not want this to be in the previous post as it goes somewhere else. The point we start from in this brain-journey is LinuxDay in Dornbirn again.

I thought about whether writing an email to kde-promo or blog about it, and i’m pretty confident that this is the better way, as i hope raises more of these odds i was confronted with at the event.

With KDE 4 a main design goal was – coherent to what we were criticised for – usability and configurability. While trying to provide the same functionality we were aiming for a simpler, smoother user interface, “human” inspired user interaction, managable configuration dialogs. The cooperation of artists, usability experts and coders was fantastic, what we have now – and better, where we’re going in the future – is just that!

… we just forgot to tell our users …

Well, not forgot; but that’s what i noticed from the questions at the event, the focus – once “when will it be released” – now shifted to “i used to be able to do this” or “where’s this feature gone”, and it’s usually one of those things i was never proud of when showing or explaining in the past. Now i would, but now these seem a problem! People got used to the oddness, got used to massive configuration dialogs! They are unable to cope with our simplicity! What I am talking about? Well, here’s some examples:

Q Where can i define, which application is started on this filetype … it used to be in Konqueror configuration, but i can’t find it now…
A Well, this has actually never been functionality that “belonged” to Konqui, it’s always been something system specific. (by that time i didn’t even know where it actually was, i was guessing – guessing right, so the new scheme is correct!) It was thus moved into the system settings directly! (oh, lucky me, there it is!).

Q When will i be able to configure the panel again??? There used to be this dialog there, but it’s gone! Will this be in 4.2?
A Well, it’s on your system already! Now you just find it “on spot”, right at the panel itself, rather than the dialog. Look…

Q There used to be a way to change icon size in konqui, now this is gone with dolphin. Why is that, and when will this come back??
A It’s moved out of a dialog and directly into the UI! Just look down here *me sliding the slider* *visitor: aaaaaaaaaaaaah, ok*

I could go on for a while here, this really is 90% of questions at the event. People are disappointed for not finding something that’s tight there cause they search for it in not-anymore-bloated config dialogs! We wanted to make things easier and now face people unable to operate the system anymore… This really crys for a change, i’m sorry i can’t be at the meeting in Frankfurth next weekend, but i hope we’ll find time to address this at some point remotely…