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KDE Women at the KDE 4 Release Event in January:

Kubuntu at the KDE 4 Release Event in January:

Maryland Ubuntu Loco meeting in February:

seele :: Feb.27.2008 :: Asides, Life, Open Source :: Comments Off

Two things that really bug me about the KDE4 desktop proper. These observations are based on what I found in the Suse KDE4 Live CD (4.0.61 snapshot) but the same is true for the KDE4 packages in Kubuntu.

1. What am I zooming and where is my wallpaper?

So when I first heard about the zooming desktop and saw Aaron demonstrate it at the release party, I thought “way cool”. Finally, someone has done something with zooming beyond the eye candy and nausea that is useful.

Unfortunately, I have yet to figure out how to get the damn thing to work or what it is supposed to do. Originally, I thought the different zones of the desktop were related to virtual desktops, and when you zoomed out, you could see the hidden desktops because you have more room on the screen. Then I realized that the virtual desktops and applications were independent of what was being zoomed, and the zooming seems to only apply to Plasmoids. What purpose is there for zooming Plasmoids which are already scalable? Was the impression of multiple desktops a goal or an accident?

Is this really how it is supposed to work out of box (i.e. require a certain amount of configuration before it “just works”) or is it one of those things still “under construction”? See below for what I mean. I suspect it is not really broken and I just can not figure it out, but that is a problem in itself. You can add and move Plasmoids to other parts of the screen (including white space) but I couldn’t figure out how to apply my missing wallpaper or what configuration settings were available (I didn’t find anything relevant in System Settings).

What are we zooming and why? What defaults do we need in place to prevent this impression of “brokeness” you get from missing desktop wallpaper? Where are the configuration options?

2. Zoom the content, not the controls

I think this is a common complaint and could be nominated for a Daily WTF. As you can see in the above screenshots, as the desktop scales, the controls scale with it. So when you have a tiny desktop, you get tiny controls to match. So tiny that you can not activate, read, or click them to make the desktop big again.

I’m sure the exact size of the original target was carefully considered to make it easy for users to Add Widgets or Zoom Out their desktop. Why throw all of those considerations out the door when the interface gets smaller? The size of the controls should never change (at least to a point). Currently the controls scale with the desktop surface, so if the desktop is zoomed out to 25%, the controls are now 25% of their original size. And that is only for the first zoom step!

Consider maintaining the original size of the controls in each zoom step, or use smart scaling so that when the desktop is 1/16 of its original size (zoom out step 2), the controls are still readable and clickable. See below.

Related Bug 154485

Comments? Point 1 is more of a call for help, where 2 is a you-best-fix-this-now suggestion.

seele :: Feb.21.2008 :: General, KDE/Kubuntu :: 21 Comments »

An article I wrote for the Usability Professionals Associations’ (UPA) bi-monthly online newsletter, The UPA Voice, is now online. In it, I give the professional usability community an introduction to open source software and why it is a great community to participate in as a designer. I tend to do a lot of education and outreach of design to developers in open source software, but there needs to be more efforts in the other direction of contributors of open source software to designers.

Go on and read Usability in Open Source. It is a pretty general article, but I hope to do more open source education in the design world (as I do design education in the open source world) in the future.

seele :: Feb.16.2008 :: General, Open Source, Usability :: 2 Comments »

I caught up with Jeff Bianchine at SCALE 2008 and talked a bit with him about design in open source.

I think I may have misspoke about the split button widget — I know it was something we (usability/HCI projects) discussed and hoped for in QT4, but I haven’t seen it added yet. The other interface element I mentioned I was happy about was the way ephemeral information was being handled in the UI (using plasmoid-like notifications rather than intrusive window popups), making the computer manage the information rather than the user.

seele :: Feb.11.2008 :: Asides, Design, Open Source :: 3 Comments »

Here are my slides for this morning’s talk at the Southern California Linux Expo.

A Quick and Dirty Intro to UCD in OSS (PDF 2.5MB)

seele :: Feb.09.2008 :: Asides, Design, Open Source :: Comments Off