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List: kde-devel
Subject: KDE rough edges - file-types in KDE 3
From: Ian Wadham <ianw2 () optusnet ! com ! au>
Date: 2007-09-19 5:58:20
Message-ID: 200709191558.20687.ianw2 () optusnet ! com ! au
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Being able click on a file or file-name link and have it opened
by a reasonable choice of application is a rather basic desktop
feature that has been around since the Xerox Star (1980) and
before. It is to me an important aspect of user-friendliness.
On another thread ("Walt Mossberg") we have been talking
about "rough edges" and I mentioned cries for help from my
wife. Here is what happened a couple of days ago.
My wife's brother had sent her some emails with photos of their
mother's 97th birthday party attached.
BTW my wife has stopped asking me why, in KMail, you have to
scroll right to the end to see what attachments are present and to
open them. I simply do not know. In Windows, the list of attachments
(if any) was always displayed in the header area and you could
not miss attachments (as she and I sometimes do in KMail).
I was peacefully reading the morning paper when all hell broke
loose. "What's happening? What's happening?", she cried. I
dropped everything and rushed in to help (a heart attack is always
a possibility at our age).
Her screen was splattered with tiny windows, scattered in amongst
the usual KMail panes. "That's not my mother!" she cried. I vaguely
recognised a small furry animal ... "It's that bloody Gimp," I fumed,
"What's it doing there?". "I don't know," she said, "All I did was click
on Peter's attachment. And what's a Gimp, anyway?". Useless to
explain that AFAIK it's a disabled American soldier, with no
relationship to graphics software or family photos.
I took the chair and was thankful Lisa tiptoed out of the room
before my reputation as family guru was torn to shreds. It turned
out that the attached photos were JPEG files, as are most photos
coming from digital cameras these days, but the default setup for
my wife's desktop had chosen the Gimp to open JPEG's. This is
with SuSE 10.0 and KDE 3.4.2, which gets you a very nice green
chameleon as wallpaper.
BTW the Gimp is my all-time least favourite and least usable
user-interface. I even shelled out $96 once for a book called
"Grokking the GIMP", but was still unable to learn it. So why
was it the default for opening a JPEG?
My next problem was to find out how to change it - to Gwenview,
for example. I searched for about half an hour through KMail
and Control Center settings to try and find anything that related
to recognising file-types - but in vain. This is about as much fun
(for me) as turning over rocks looking for snails in my garden.
There are just so MANY options, most of which I will never use or
understand. Even the words they use are hard for me to understand -
and I am English, born and bred, and have 40 years experience in
this industry. So how are non-English users supposed to cope?
Finally I thought of right-clicking on the attachment link in the email
and there it was - an Open With... option - and in the dialog box a
"Remember application association for this type of file" option. So
I selected Gwenview, called my wife back in and away she went.
Her 97-year old mother appeared in all her glory.
Then my wife wanted to know if I could copy the photos onto a CD
she could take to Ted's camera shop and get prints ... Hmmmm ...
Well I did it (k3b), though I was not sure which application to use
and, just to be sure, I replayed the disk in Windows, but she still
has not been to the camera shop for the acid test ...
I am sorry this post has been so lengthy, but I hope you have had
a few laughs and I really wanted to get across some flavour of
what KDE can be like for a first-time user. And that *is* a matter for
developers to consider IMHO. I'm hoping KDE 4.0 will be a lot
easier to use ...
All the best, Ian W.
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