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Re: KDE.org: A New Site for a New KDE
by John Califf on Tuesday 31/Oct/2000, @17:55
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Yes, I really like the new look especially the top banner with Konqui the dragon showing things off. It loads quickly too.
I'm sure the site will evolve more quickly now with the new framework in place, in response to comments by visitors. A little more in the way of fancy graphics might be useful, maybe in the context of stories. Thank God you got rid of the notebook image and the animated gif.
There are two gripes, though.
1. Centering. Since you are using a fixed width page it should be centered in the browser. Currently everything is flush with the left edge and the title banner doesn't line up with the tables below. This is how it looks in the current Konqueror. Not quite right.
2. apps.kde.com. If you are going to link to this site, please get the webmaster there to fix the site. It's horrible. Yes, it does have the apps, but hangs up if you are using a proxy. Doesn't eveyone use junkbuster or something? The default view with 4 (count em) frames puts a strain on any browser, including Konqueror. Switching to the no-frames view usually crashes or hangs up Konqueror and Netscape, placing a recursive view of the entire page in the cetner frame, at least for me, and clicking on app links in the right hand frame often does the same.
I feel that Kde should have its own apps listing anyway and not rely on this commercial site. To me, it's a confict of interests. If you insist on using it for apps annoucements please at least make it usable for those of us who value our privacy and refuse to accept cookies or turn off our filtering proxies.
John |
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Re: KDE.org: A New Site for a New KDE
by Dre on Tuesday 31/Oct/2000, @18:25
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> 2. apps.kde.com. If you are going to link to this site, please get the
> webmaster there to fix the site. It's horrible.
Hi, I hope we can solve your problems.
> Yes, it does have the
> apps, but hangs up if you are using a proxy.
That shouldn't happen, I myself often use a proxy to access the site.
If somehow you are in the position where it tries to serve compressed
HTML to speed up downloading, many proxies are buggy and can't handle
it. However, the site has a mechanism to detect this and it should
not happen a second time. It would probably be more helpful if the
buggy proxies were fixed, though.
> Doesn't eveyone use
> junkbuster or something? The default view with 4 (count em) frames puts
> a strain on any browser, including Konqueror. Switching to the
> no-frames view usually crashes or hangs up Konqueror and Netscape,
I don't have that problem. Which Konqueror do you use and which Netscape
do you use? I've been to the site thousands of times and my browser has
never crashed.
May I suggest the text option for you? It's quite a bit lighter.
> placing a recursive view of the entire page in the cetner frame, at least
> for me, and clicking on app links in the right hand frame often does
> the same
That's a bug in your browser, hopefully that will get fixed. Once
the 2.0.1 version is out we can start thinking about dealing with
khtml quirks to make things work better, until now it's been improving
too quickly to make it worth it.
> I feel that Kde should have its own apps listing anyway and not rely
> on this commercial site. To me, it's a confict of interests. If you
> insist on using it for apps annoucements please at least make it usable
> for those of us who value our privacy and refuse to accept cookies or turn
> off our filtering proxies.
There is no need to accept cookies to use the site and there is no
need to turn off filtering proxies. It uses HTML just like every other
site, though if your browser says it accepts gzip'd data it may actually try to send it, since it can't know there is a buggy proxy in the way. If you have any particular problems that can't be resolved with
a reload please write me, we are always working to make the site better.
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Re: KDE.org: A New Site for a New KDE
by Claus Rasmussen on Wednesday 01/Nov/2000, @11:44
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I'll second your comments on apps.kde.com .
Perhaps the intension with apps.kde.com was to make it easy to navigate, but the 4 (four!) frames just clutters the screen. It would be much better with a unframed version of the app-index as the front page.
Also the listings of the software is too terse. To get a grip about what a software package is about you need to enter the page for that package. Look at freshmeat how to make a informative summary of a package.
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Re: KDE.org: A New Site for a New KDE
by Dre on Wednesday 01/Nov/2000, @15:16
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Perhaps the intension with apps.kde.com was to make it easy to navigate, but the 4 (four!) frames just clutters the screen. It would be much better with a unframed version of the app-index as the front page.
You can bookmark it that way, if you like, just usehttp://apps.kde.com/indexnf.php as your entry point. Perhaps the kde.org front page can have a sub-link for the no-frames option.
Also the listings of the software is too terse. To get a grip about what a software package is about you need to enter the page for that package. Look at freshmeat how to
make a informative summary of a package.
The only thing freshmeat does is add a "changes" paragraph. IMHO that does not give you a better feel for the app but insted clutters the page. What apps.kde.com provides is the app's icon and the app's documentation, if it comes in the package; though you have to click to view the documentation, I find this information much more helpful in deciding if an app is for me. Which is why we use frames, it makes these clicks extremely fast (including to the screenshots, also not found at Freshmeat, and to the full ChangeLog).
To get back to the Changes paragraph, the way they do that is force developers to provide that information. Once developers start contributing more we'll be happy to include that information :-). We actually refer to it as a "Version Comment".
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Re: KDE.org: A New Site for a New KDE
by Claus Rasmussen on Thursday 02/Nov/2000, @09:20
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You can bookmark it that way, if you like, just usehttp://apps.kde.com/indexnf.php as your entry point. Perhaps the kde.org front page can have a sub-link for the no-frames option.
You're right. The non-frames version is much better. I would suggest that you make the non-frame version the default link.
The only thing freshmeat does is add a "changes" paragraph. IMHO that does not give you a better feel for the app but insted clutters the page.
I think the "changes" paragraph is fine, but YMMV. But it was not the "changes" paragraph I
was referring to. It was the descriptions of the packages. I know - by now - that its not your fault, but the developers. But take a lot at this random description taken from the first item at the freshmeat page to see how I think it should be done:
"SkinCat.pl is a Perl script that will decrypt and look up just about anything you can scan with a :Cue:Cat. If the barcode is an ISBN, it will print out the title and author, as listed at amazon.com. It also does lookups on DCNV's database. SkinCat does not send your CueCat serial number anywhere. It is very useful for command-line lookups, and can be used as part of a database-entry system".
...and compare it to this (extreme) example from apps.kde.com:
a radio card tool
Oh, and I almost forgot to tell you: I do like the new layout of www.kde.org. Congrats.
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