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It's not a coincidence
by Eike Hein on Wednesday 13/Apr/2005, @18:09
Great stuff. It strikes me that KDE is in the almost unique position of having the technology, the development ethic and the organizational structure to accomplish such a turn-around, thanks to the tightness and code-reuse within the KDE platform. Which other player in the field could roll out such heavy-weight technology in a reasonably complete set of desktop applications at the same time - the enabling condition for being able to take advantage of contexts? Apple comes to mind, arguably, but the list pretty much ends there.
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Re: It's not a coincidence
by ltmon on Wednesday 13/Apr/2005, @18:36
The KDE team did spend a lot of time in early versions getting the framework right with integration technology such as dcop, kio and kparts.

I guess they (and we users coincidentally) are now set up to reap the benefits of this extra effort.

L.
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Re: It's not a coincidence
by Scott Wheeler on Thursday 14/Apr/2005, @04:19
From my blog last week (http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/view/953):

"KDE has the tightest coupling of application frameworks and applications of any desktop in existence. We can't throw as much money or as many PhD's at a problem as proprietary desktops, but we can push new ideas out in a fraction of the time that they can."
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  • Re: It's not a coincidence
    by Anonymous on Monday 18/Apr/2005, @15:30
    OS X is pretty close. IMHO Apple is starting with great usability and heading towards rich frameworks, while KDE starts with great frameworks and is heading towards usability.

    Still, while Apple spends developer time on interfacing with users and swallowing their ego when it comes to UI development and testing, there's still too much of the "my way is the right way so frack off" in the KDE world.

    While KDE folk can (and IMHO) should steal all the nicest bits of OS X UI, I'm sure there's folks at Apple who will look at KDE's cool tech with an ugly face and they'll steal those ideas and plop a great UI on them.
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    • Re: It's not a coincidence
      by Jens on Friday 22/Apr/2005, @15:41
      I just got myself a Mac Mini - mainly because I needed a multimedia capable machine that still fits around my table, and because I wanted to make music. So here's the Linux user's view on OS X.

      Yes, Apple did a lot for usability. But some of the things really get on your nerves in OS X, and I'd rather say the "my way or the highway" philosophy applies for OS X far more than for KDE. In KDE, there are usually several ways to achieve some task. In OS X, there is usually just one way. There are far fewer buttons and switches in applications, and this makes it easy for a beginner to get aquainted with the app, but it really gets on my nerves when I e.g. can only have a button for left OR right rotate in iPhoto's toolbar, not both.
      And Apple Mail starts downloading (caching) your whole IMAP account by default as soon as you configure it (about 800MB in my case), and cannot search in mails any more once you disable this. (Whatever is the IMAP SEARCH command for?)

      So, I think somewhere there should be a middle ground. Apple has some *really* cool applications and although I miss some features in the iLife apps, they *are* good software. but the default user interface is just to ... barren ... feature wise. It's overloaded with special FX to compensate for that, though.

      German speaking users, please visit <a href='http://news.jensbenecke.de/node/851'>my blog</a> for a more in depth review. :-)

      Jens
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