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Usability
by MandrakeUser on Monday 10/May/2004, @11:00

Dear Friends, I love KDE, it is my only DE. I think the internal architecture
(in part thank to Qt) is just outstanding. This is clear when you see how well the component model works (things like DCOP and all)

The 2 fronts where I think KDE can get stronger are Usability and Consolidation.

USABILITY: It would be great to prioritize the Usability project,really. Some things can be much more user friendly:

1) Config menues: add consistently (through the apps) an "advanced options" button, and just leave a few relevant options for the "regular user". As an example, take the config dialog in Konqueror, there are so many options that it is overwhelming. It takes me quite a bit of time to navigate through them and I am a nerd ;-)

2) File associations: they really are hard to set up if you don't know exactly what to do. There is no waay to fall back to "defaults" for instance. This is another functionality that should always be available I think: a "Defaults" button.

CONSOLIDATION: Some areas are nicely coordinated (Office, recently PIM, etc). But things like multimedia need some consolidation. There are several audio apps, some of them overlap, some of them are hardly useful, I think that some integration and consolidation is needed. There should be one killer Photo program (digikam for me ;-), one killer media player, etc. I end up using Noatun for some things, real player for some others, KMplayer for others ... it's all good but integration would be better :-)

Just my 2cts thinking of the future. And yes, I love KDE, and I find it better than any other GUI I ever used, including windows :-) (never tried MacOS)

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Re: Usability
by JeroenV on Monday 10/May/2004, @11:58

<I>1) Config menues: add consistently (through the apps) an "advanced options" button, and just leave a few relevant options for the "regular user". As an example, take the config dialog in Konqueror, there are so many options that it is overwhelming. It takes me quite a bit of time to navigate through them and I am a nerd ;-)</I>

Many configurable options aren't a real problem IMO, as long as the options that matter are in the first few screens. AND the options are linked to that program only.

E.g., what I would like to see is a distinction between the Konqueror File Manager configuration and the Konqueror Webbrowser configuration. The Control Center allready has this distinction, it would be better IMO if the app itself had this too.

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Re: Usability
by Ian Whiting on Tuesday 11/May/2004, @14:43

If KDE is going to be taken seriously by the majority of business users then things do need to be simplified for the average user, and that does mean hideing advanced options that only IT professionals use. This could mean that there are specific tools for configuring advanced options (other than a text editor on the configuration files).

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Re: Usability
by Datschge on Wednesday 12/May/2004, @17:20

If business users take IT seriously enough to employ a decent IT staff they are already today able to take advantage of KDE's high configurability which allows administrators to easily adapt KDE to specific use cases by fine tuning and locking down parts or all of KDE's user interface. The keywords are KXMLGUI and KIOSK. (And that all is completely independent of whatever KDE itself decides to do for simplifying the defaults for average users, something which shouldn't be of any concern to any serious IT staff anyway.)

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Re: Usability
by Tom Chance on Monday 10/May/2004, @14:19

If you're interested in talking about these issues more, you might consider getting into one of these two projects:

KDE Quality Teams
Do as much or as little as you want talking about both issues, either just in one module (e.g. talk with users and developers more about consolidation in kdemultimedia) or generally.
http://quality.kde.org

KDE Usability
It's quite high-traffic, but if you subscribe with digest mode on (as I have it) you get one or two e-mails a day, and can talk with other usability people and developers directly.
http://usability.kde.org

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Re: Usability
by Manfred Tremmel on Tuesday 11/May/2004, @10:06

To the Point Media-Player: Do you have tested Kaffeine? SuSE uses Kaffein as default player since 9.0, TurboLinux sells it as DVD Player. It plays nearly everything (based on libxine) and is great integrated in KDE/Konqueror (parts plugin) and other browsers (browser plugin) and the gui is much more powerfull then the lightweight KMplayer.

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