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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Fork of KDE4/Qt3?
From:       Richard Dale <rdale () foton ! es>
Date:       2008-06-10 16:13:48
Message-ID: 200806101713.48621.rdale () foton ! es
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On Monday 09 June 2008 19:10:58 Michael Hoffer wrote:
> The whole discussion is really boring! It's like the discussions about
> the effectiveness of graphical user interfaces in the 80ies. I thinkt
> that plasma developers will be very thankfull if people make real
> suggestions instead of just complaining without trying to understand
> the consequences of the new idea.
>
> The KDE/Plasma developers are not the first ones who realize the use
> of the classical Desktop folder is problematic. Apple has a more
> conservative solution. They introduced stacks. The problem is that
> people will still use the old way of placing dozens of files and
> folders on the desktop and will use stacks just as a cool aditional
> feature. Also stacks are not really flexible. From this aspect the KDE
> approach is much better from my point of view.
The graphical desktop originated on the Xerox Star (1981), and the Apple Lisa 
(1982) and Macintosh (1984) machines. Alan Kay played large part in designing 
the windows/mouse/bitblt'd UI that we use today at Xerox PARC (not where the 
Xerox Star was designed) - he thought the graphical desktop with icons was a 
really bad idea. 

He prefered the idea of 'bins' containing items found by dynamic searches 
instead. That is much closer to what we are moving to, now we realise that 
jumble of icons doesn't scale, and graphical representations of heirarchical 
file systems don't either. It is often faster to find something by using 
Google to search the internet than it is to search in my own computer - that 
suggests something has gone seriously wrong. I can't wait for stuff like 
Nepomuk, Akonadi and Plasma to come together and render the Macintosh UI 
c.1984 finally obsolete.

So I say let's move as fast as possible away from icon messes, and people who 
prefer the KDE 3.x approach can simply stay with KDE 3.x, and even write code 
for it if they want to.

-- Richard

 
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