Re: KDE4

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Re: KDE4
by Sebastian Sauer on Tuesday 08/Jan/2008, @07:55

"usability" or "decide how others should work" was clearly not the reason for the decision to go with the generic aka describing name. It was more the question what may work well and if users will accept it. There where multiple points I/we did look at;
1) What needs to be really configurable and what doesn't. Goal here is/was to don't provide a checkbox for every single combination of solutions by picking a default and look if that's enough. Related to the name vs. description vs. description (name) vs. name (description) case; seems there is just no easy solution for this :-/
2) The traditional KDE3 style menu does even contain already a hack to e.g. display "OpenOffice.org Presentation" (the name) rather then "Presentation" (the description). One of the problems here was, that the generic name is used different between e.g. KDE and Gnome. While we define only the application name, so e.g. "kspread" as name and "Spreadsheet" as description, others prefer do use the generic name as appname+description field, e.g. "Gnumeric Spreadsheet" as generic name and "Spreadsheet" as description. That makes it rather difficult to just choose e.g. "description (name)" without looking somehow broken :-/

So, all in all: something that can be made better with an idea how to make it better :)

Related Links

·   Articles on KDE in the News
·   Also by Sebastian Sauer
·   Contact author

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Re: KDE4
by reihal on Wednesday 09/Jan/2008, @03:18

Eh, please, this is KDE not gnome.
You are obviously entangled in some heated discussion behind the scenes
which I don't want to know about.
Description;name or name;description is the only variations that makes sense.

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Re: KDE4
by Sebastian Sauer on Wednesday 09/Jan/2008, @07:53

> You are obviously entangled in some heated discussion behind the scenes which I don't want to know about.

Oh, you should know about them cause one of the goals of an open project is also to be transparent on such things what I tried to achieve by explaining the way that was leading to the result.
But beside transparency participation is another great thing an open project is able to provide. E.g. with your reply you already did participate since that's feedback and without such kind of feedback it would be rather difficult to know what ppl expect and how things should be solved.

> Description;name or name;description is the only variations that makes sense.

and that's now a decision you made behind the scenes cause there may ppl who may not agree there. Guess that's the "problem" about beeing human with an own idea how things should be. What helps most here is btw earlier participation and talks.
In the menu-case such kind of feedback was just missing and that's why it is how it is now. But since we saw within that thread already very good feedback, it's now easier to take them into account.

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