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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    Re: [kde-promo] [OT] Re: kde 42 visual guide
From:       "Aaron J. Seigo" <aseigo () kde ! org>
Date:       2009-01-04 4:40:30
Message-ID: 200901032140.30807.aseigo () kde ! org
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On Saturday 03 January 2009, Jos Poortvliet wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 6:36 PM, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2009/1/3 Jos Poortvliet <jospoortvliet@gmail.com>:
> >> I've been thinking about a more general introduction of what's new in
> >> plasma, as I currently jump to the long list of "what's new" right
> >> away. I've just made this up, comments?
> >>
> >> Plasma provides your workspace with a flexible desktop. Plasma fully
> >> consists of replacable widgets, and thus allows you to organize the
> >> desktop however you want. The Dashboard ensures your desktop is never
> >> more than a quick "CONTROL+F12" away so you can have a look at the
> >> widgets to read or add notes, check for news or weather updates and
> >> use the dictionary. In KDE 4.2 Plasma has received many new features,
> >> stability and performance improvements. The developers have worked to
> >> bring back the functionality that was lost when KDE started its
> >> journey towards the 4.0 release and are confident to have reached that
> >> goal, and surpassed it in many ways. Stability has been improved, both
> >> by reducing crashes and greatly increasing the resilience of Plasma
> >> when issues do arise. Plasma monitors its state, and when bad things
> >> happen, responds by restarting itself with a previous, stable
> >> configuration. Close collaboration between core Plasma developers,
> >> Kwin developers and developers of infrastructure underlying to KDE has
> >> resulted in much better performance. There is still room for
> >> improvement but we feel we can safely recommend Plasma on lower-end
> >> (albeit not ancient) hardware. However it should be noted Plasma can
> >> never be expected to perform equal or better than other solutions with
> >> a much more limited scope and featureset.
> >
> > It is a hard read, with too many redundant adjectives. An example is
> > the word "fully" in the second sentence. Removing it makes the
> > sentence easier to parse. Maybe native English speakers would have an
> > easier time with it, but if that were content on a web page I would
> > have stopped reading after the second sentence. I want facts, not
> > fluff.
>
> Thank you. It IS useless fluff, I trew it away. It prompted me to go
> through the document and fix a few layout issues, titles, redundant
> talk etc. So the end result was good. In the end I boiled it down to:
>
>
> Plasma allows you to organize your workspace however you want. It has
> become easier to place the pannels, add and move applets around and
> configure Plasma.

too far in the other direction imho.

ok, some writing tips:

* short paragraphs. 4 short paragraphs are better than 1 medium sized one, 
even if the 4 short paragraphs are actually longer

* don't use the same noun/verb/adjective twice in the same sentence. note that 
in the sentence above it begins ends with Plasma. perhaps replace the second 
Plasma with "your workspace"

* remember the "introduce, detail, conclude" workflow

* hep the reader to "buy in" by using 'us' and ownership words: "we", "our", 
"your"

* avoid jargon, be consistent in what jargon we do use. in this case "applets" 
is incorrect. they aren't applets. they are widgets.

* always work towards a goal: what should the reader come away from this 
thinking?

that last point is probably the most important. *what* are we trying to 
achieve with this bit on plasma? probably 2 things:

1) communicate to people that it's a good time to move from other environments 
to a plasma based workspace

2) that plasma is wicked cool and that YOU WANT IT!!!1!

how do we communicate that?

1) show feature parity and ease of use

2) highlight 3 key cool features that are impactful, and mention 3 others in 
passing, then hit them with a little data perhaps on "number of new features, 
bugs closed". we've been keeping a plasma changelog for a reason ;)

3) screenshots and screencasts

i'm really, really tempted to write this whole part myself, but i'm also 
really, really feeling like this work needs to be able to done by others too. 
=)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software


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