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Every once in a while I will be using an application which is unique to KDE and think “Wow this is really neat” or “I don’t know how to live without this tool”. Today that application is KSnapshot.

KSnapshot is a simple screen capture tool that does way more than your every day print screen. As a designer, this tool is essential when I do interface reviews or prepare client briefings. Along with taking screen captures of the entire screen or individual windows, it also allows you to draw and select a region to capture, select a specific windowing element such as a toolbar or menu, and also has options to remove window decorations. You can then choose what you want to do with the image, such as directly saving to file (it auto-increments the previous filename which is nice for interface documentation), copying directly to clipboard (what I used the most for note taking and client briefings), or sending directly to printer (paper copies are good to draw on and take notes).

If I did the same thing in Windows, I would spend half of my time in Photoshop cutting up pieces of screen and recreating menus.

There is little I would change about KSnapShot except for a few very minor things. I’d like to set the default file type for saving images. Being able to select a region on a window is incredibly powerful, but sometimes it gets tricky to select certain elements. It would be great if when using the region selector to be able to resize the box before commiting, sort of how the crop tool works.

Overall, my daily life is made better by KSnapshot. Rock on!

seele :: Feb.26.2007 :: Design, General, KDE/Kubuntu :: 12 Comments »

This one is for Katie. I’ve always been jealous of the incredibly cute and tasty looking lunch boxes she makes to take to work.

I don’t have many opportunities to pack lunches since I work from home, but on Thursdays I am gone all day to work in the lab and go to class. I managed to find a food storage container with small compartments that would be perfect for the different bite-sized things that go in to bento lunch boxes.

As far as I know, onigiri and dumplings are supposed to be pretty easy to make. Pfft.

Some of you may have heard my disaster stories of my trying to make onigiri (several times to no avail) and dumplings (both homemade and frozen). Solving the onigiri problem was easy: use the right rice and get a rice cake press (I was trying to make them by hand with apparently the wrong kind of rice). The dumpling problem took a little more time. The first time I made them (homemade), they fell appart in the pan. The second time I made them (frozen from the store), somehow I made gyoza soup. A few tried later, I figured out the correct time for steaming and pan frying so they disintegrate and fall apart.

Clockwise from top: Teriyaki mixed vegetables, edamame, vegetable steamed dumplings, omeboshi and seasoned onigiri.

seele :: Feb.22.2007 :: Food, General, Life :: 3 Comments »

For those of you who contact me via my KDE.org mail, it has been down for about a week. If you need to get in contact with me, try me at seele(at)obso1337(dot)org.

seele :: Feb.18.2007 :: Asides, Life :: Comments Off

Steven Harms from Planet Ubuntu talks about the current drama between Linus and Gnome with KDE stuck in the middle. One of his opening comments (a conclusion I assume he drew not only from the article but from his personal experience) was that there is no such thing as usability.

He’s right. There really is no such thing as usability — it’s a single property of the user experience which has be marketed to death in both industry and opensource. It is an easily recognized word, so it’s used and misused all the time. It has become so popular and so recognizable that other disciplines have been trying to “own” usability to make themselves more marketable.

AFAIK Gnome doesn’t like referring to its interface as “dumbed-down”, but they’ve only done the easy part of taking the hard stuff out, not redesigning it to work better. As a result, their lack of functionality and options (which is another property of experience) makes them very attractive to newer users (I am not implying that Gnome is not suitable for more advanced users).

On the flip side, KDE is known to provide options and customizability, and has a right to expect newer users will have a higher learning curve which hopefully pays off. The DE runs in to trouble when they want to be as easy to learn as Gnome and grow with their users needs and expectations. This is one of many tricky problems the design world has been trying to solve for years (and so far we’ve only managed to create separate products, it turns out that “user levels” weren’t such a hot idea).

As infantile as a flame war may be, Linus has every right to submit patches to improve Gnome the way he wants it (he is fortunate in having that capacity), and Gnome has every right to reject them. That is the nature of open source. Is this drama high profile because it is a man against a project, or because it Linus against a Gnome? Regardless, it certainly makes for good media.

seele :: Feb.17.2007 :: General, Open Source, Usability :: 4 Comments »

Way to go media (particularly The Jem Report):

Celeste Lyn Paul, a human-computer interaction (HCI) expert with the KDE project, spoke about the challenges that usability and interface design contributors face in the free and open source software world. Since usability and user interface design were mentioned as more likely projects for female contributors than coding, Paul’s presentation was particularly relevant to the session’s rapt attendees.

Somehow I don’t remember myself or anyone else saying that usability and user interface design are “more likely projects” for women to participate in than coding. Infact, I would argue these projects are more difficult for anyone (men and women) to get involved with, because if you are a female contributor (some of who seem to think this makes life in OSS more difficult), you also have to deal with the every day challenges of being a designer in open source.

If you think the meritocracy to which developers must prove themselves is difficult, try being a designer who wants to get something done in a developer-centric world. Being a designer in open source has presented much more difficult challenges to overcome than any of my other metadata has presented me. Did they not learn anything from my presentation?

seele :: Feb.13.2007 :: General, Open Source, Usability :: 10 Comments »