Which evolution?
Giovanni <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.kde.devel.kwrite |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Dear Kate Development Team, I am sending you this email to ask you a question: where is KDE going? Let me explain. A long time ago a certain college student named Matthias Ettrich posted an e-mail announcing the birth of KDE. In it he stated his intent to give life to a desktop under Linux and one of the objectives was that of the consistency of programs following common guidelines. About two decades have passed since that day and KDE has matured as well as the Qt libraries that are its foundation. Now KDE applications can work, obviously recompiled, both under Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X but something has been lost: the much desired consistency of applications in their UI! The problem of UI consistency is a problem that arose at the dawn of the birth of graphic environments. Who remembers Smalltalk? Or the Xerox Alto? I believe very few. Then Apple arrived and with the Lisa took the concepts developed by Xerox and put its own. We know how it ended but its failure generated the Macintosh, the original one, where the concepts of the Lisa were taken and refined, especially by simplifying them due to little memory! Time passes and so did the Macintosh change and what did Microsoft do? He took a little bit here and a little bit there and created Microsoft WIndows. I bet some of you like me have known about Windows 3.0 or 3.1. The PC became cheaper and GUIs became the norm. Then one day, over there in Finland, a rather thin baby was born, without great pretensions, the result of the work of a certain Linus Torvalds. The baby quickly grew and finally received KDE as a gift in 1996. Now we come to our days and here begins the reason for my emails. Remember what one of KDE's goals was? Consistency in applications or never reinvent the wheel. One of the objectives of the UI is to simplify, better organize, intuitively the user's activity. What is the purpose of the menu bar? Logically organize user operations. According to the KDE guidelines, the File menu must manage everything related to the creation, loading, saving, printing and closing of the application while the Edit menu must manage all the operations related to the selection of the text or other within the work area inside the main window, the View menu for managing what is presented in the main window, the Settings menu the program settings and finally in the Help menu which provides aids on the program such as access to help on that program in addition to accessing information about that program. Obviously the guidelines for graphical interfaces exist in abundance but we are obviously interested in those of KDE, those of today's Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. I added the last two because KDE also operates under these two environments. These are the respective links (https://develop.kde.org/hig/introduction/; https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/platforms/designing-for-macos/; https: / /download.microsoft.com/download/2/4/A/24A81A29-77CF-4AA5-967E-64E42554F21B/UWP%20app%20design%20guidelines%20v1509.pdf). On the guidelines of Microsoft Windows we draw a painful veil since in the course of its life it has been turned over several times not to facilitate the user but to make money! You have to force the user to have to relearn the use of an application from scratch, otherwise what's the point? Now you can explain to me the rationale of creating two new menus such as Select and Go when logically in the first there are items that fall under the Edit menu while in the second there are also items that, logically and in the style of the UI, appear here. also under the Edit menu? Then there is an API problem. Under KDE KStandardAction covers some of the actions and it doesn't seem to me that KStandardAction :: selectAll () or KStandardAction :: deselect () have been moved from that menu. Yes, there is a problem with the Go menu under KDE but usually the Goto Line ... or Goto Page ... command in editors ends up under the Edit menu. But the last treat was putting the Bookmarks menu inside the Go menu! And here too this clashes with the KDE API, again with KStandardAction! The addBookmark() and editBookmark() functions ... I understand that Kate is no longer the application born in origin, just look at the source code of the distant KDevelop 1.0 with which it has been linked since its origins, I understand that many functions have been added but that consistency of the graphical interfaces that was the goal of does 1996 still exist nowadays? I'll give you some examples that have left me dumbfounded: Kate, these latest versions; KDevelop starting from version 4.0; Kexi and the Calligra suite. I'm discussing Kate with you but KDevelop is, pardon the term, on the edge of decency. If KDE was to be based on application consistency, KDevelop almost reaches its limits. With Kexi sia reaches the highest levels, we are at "I wish I was a Microsoft product"! About two years ago I happened to have to use one of the latest versions of Microsoft Word, you know the ones with the Ribbon interface. Do you know what my feeling was trying to figure out where the print command was which he later found to be in the system menu? Choking Bill Gates after forcing him to eat banknotes in profusion. Consider what I wrote as a complaint or complaint from an old computer enthusiast who started using Linux on a now forgotten Slackware 1.2. To make a comparison, how would you drive a car where you suddenly discovered that the steering wheel acts as an accelerator, the left pedal steers the car to the right and the right the reverse and the gearbox is reversed. A nice car to drive, don't you think? I end this email with a memory from the past (https://kde.org/announcements/1-2-3/1.0/). Yours sincerely, Giovanni Corriga.