Friday, August 05 2005 @ 05:39 AM EDT Contributed by: glosser
The developers of Qt, which KDE is based on, have started a blog to discuss any topic they wish. This time, a developer comments on the upcoming KDE 4.
There has been a lot of focus on the desktop lately, and how the desktop should evolve. Rephrasing the questions: what can/should/might KDE 4 become? There are many good ideas out there, some of which I hope will get implemented. But there’s also things I miss in the current debate, things that deal with the fundamentals of desktop computing. What a splendid opportunity to write my first blog entry, I thought, and so I did.
Some background for this article: I had the opportunity to observe an untrained desktop computer user doing real work using KDE 3.4 and Open Office. I also had the possibility to make suggestions to the workflow. The task was straight forward: Someone was sending dozens of doc files as e-mail attachment, and expected translations back. As easy the task sounds, I was surprised about the challenges that desktop computer users do face. I believe I learned valuable lessons from combining that experience with prior observations, and I would like to share my thoughts with you. In case you are a KDE developer who hasn’t yet had a chance to spend some time watching non-techie users using computers, please try to. It’s worth it, and it’s fun, no matter what desktop system they are using, KDE, Windows or Mac OS X. Watching real users doing real work on real computers is likely the best way to gain the experience necessary to create the next generation desktop system. I don’t want to read a manual before using a mobile phone, or operating a DVD player, and I don’t have to. Sending an email, receiving some files, translating them and sending them back is in the same league of complexity, and it shouldn’t require extensive training, or the need to understand how the system works under the hood.
Window management
Nobody likes to do window management. Wirth was right, although few people believed him when he designed Oberon. Users seem to go a long way to avoid having to adjust a windows position or size manually. This isn’t just untrained users, this is everybody. You can observe the same patterns on hackers everywhere. They sit in front of 20″ screens staring at a 1600×1200 background image and then typing commands in an 80×25 text window with a tiny font, having to scroll up and down all the time to read the output. It takes significant pain before someone actually uses the mouse to maximize the window vertically, or puts it to a more central spot on the screen. The same happens with other users. They go a long way scrolling around in a tiny file manager window before they might decide to make the window larger.
