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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Usability and sugestions.
From:       Kenn Brooks Hamm <khamm () andrew ! cmu ! edu>
Date:       2001-07-25 19:49:57
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> Hello.
> 
> As part of a research paper / article I wrote, I did some basic
> usability comparisons between Ximians Gnome (1.2) and KDE (2.1.1).
Cool!  I was wondering when somebody would do something like
this.  However, might it not have been a better idea to use GNOME 1.4,
which I think has been out for a while?

> On average the KDE people finished about 1.56 (minute.seconds) faster
> than the Gnome people. (noteable exception the geek on the kde "team"
> decided to forgo all graphical interfaces and complete the
> configuration tasks (change background etc) by hand by editing files.
> he failed to complete his task set, and said that the KDE config files
> where esoteric and not "user friendly")
Huh.  I've found the KDE config files reasonably simple to manipulate,
once you've seen one you've seen them all.  Of course, it would have been
easier to use KControl anyway.

> 1: the wallpaper chooser should be more like a ACDSee (windows program)
> window. (basicly what she wanted was something akin to the Icon chooser
> for KDE. when you go to change the wallpaper, a window pops up showing
> graphical representations of the files isntead of their name. this
> shouldn't be a dificult thing to implement (if you know how) as
> konq/kfm has the "make immage gallery" option...) 
Yes, I thought the same thing.  Not a serious issue, but certainly a good
thing to add at some point.

> 2: The KDE and Gnome people were allowed to interact and discuss what
> they liked and didn't like. the most noteable thing to come from this
> cross discussion is that Windows XP style taskbars are a highly
> requested feature. For those of you who have never seen WinXP, the XP
> and Gnome Task bars group like windows together under one entry on the
> task bar. For instance if you had 4 Konq windows open, you would see on
> the task bar only one Konq button, but if you clicked on it, a menu
> poped up from it listing all 4, which allows you to choose which one
> you want. The Gnome team loved that feature, and the KDE team was
> excited by the talk of it. I have no idea how to implement that or even
> whats involved with getting that to work, but it seems to me that it
> does increase screen use efficency, and with the myriad of apps (gimp,
> kaim, etc) that spawn multiple windows it seems to me that this makes a
> windowing enviroment much more user friendly / useable for the novice.
Although it's been a long time since I've used GNOME, I definitely don't
remember it having this feature.  (I suppose it's not impossible that the
last time I used GNOME was in 1.0 days, but I don't think so.)  Also, KDE
already has this in CVS, and has for some time:

http://dot.kde.org/989854861/

Since KDE is getting nearer to a major release, this should be in
everybody's hands soon.

> 3: "what the hell does the push pin do" (refering to the "sticky" icon
> on the title bar)
Yeah, Windows users don't generally grasp the whole virtual desktop thing
intuitively, although it's not too bad once it's explained to them.  I'm
not really sure the amount of text you can reasonably fit on a tooltip
could explain this fully, though.

> 4: Ximains Doorman was well appreciated by the Gnome people and the KDE
> people thought it would be a welcome addition to KDE. (I *think* this
> is in 2.2betas but I could be wrong)
What exactly is this?

(I have GNOME 1.4 installed and keep meaning to try it, but
forgetting.  If I remember, I'll probably find out.)

> 5: One user thought that the Nautilus media integration was a feature
> that should be looked into. (in nautilus you can list a directory as
> "music" and when you go into it, instead of seeing file names you see
> the id3 tag info, and you have play controls on a extra menu bar type
> thing. The same can be done with pictures etc.)
Well, Konqueror already has different "views" such as small icon, large
icon, text list, etc., so architecturally I can't see why adding this
would be too hard (although I haven't personally looked at the code).

Kenn
-- 
val K="open String; print(\"val K=\\\"\"^concat(List.foldr op:: [\"\\\" \",K]
 (List.map (fn #\"\\\\\"=>\"\\\\\\\\\"| #\"\\\"\"=>\"\\\\\\\"\"|l=>str l) (ex
plode K))))" open String; print("val K=\""^concat(List.foldr op:: ["\" ",K] (
List.map (fn #"\\"=>"\\\\"| #"\""=>"\\\""|l=>str l) (explode K))))

(* Note: Wrapped to reasonable line length.  Remove newlines to run. *)

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