Re: Article about Baloo

On Monday, February 17, 2014 15:43:29 Jos Poortvliet wrote:
> It would be great if the draft on https://notes.kde.org/p/BalooArticle could

from the article, i get the following key points:

	* stability
	* performance
	* ease of use
	* bright future

Those are great points, and the article starts off strongly. The content in 
general is great imho. The only thing that leaped out at me was that the flow 
meanders from design to developers to users to developers to migration to 
developers ... 

What would you think about simplifying the flow a bit so that it goes sth like:

Introduction
Using Baloo (”Baloo for users”)
Developing with Baloo (second half of “about baloo”)
The design behind Baloo (first half of “about baloo")
Migrating to Baloo (4.13, migration tool, KF5...)

That way people get told what it does for them / how it makes their life 
better before getting into the details of the design. 

Separating “using” from “developing” more clearly may also help the 
readability a bit; e.g. in “baloo for users” right now there is this sentence:

"The simplicity of the design will not only reduce failures, but will also 
make it easier for current and new contributors to add and improve 
functionality."

While true, it’s not really relevant to usage right now that it can be more 
easily added to in future ...

I suggest dropping the entire “Why change Nepomuk” section (regardless of what 
happens with naming): it’s technical, dry and negative. I don’t know how many 
people in the target audience will care about RDF and how it works, for 
instance. The "Making Nepomuk Usable” sub-section could be re-purposed as an 
introduction to a “design behind baloo” section. I would entirely avoid 
criticizing the outcome of the research project. 

Perhaps something along the lines of:

Since its inception, Nepomuk developers received and digested a lot of 
feedback. Application developers requested and received easier to use APIs 
(Application Programming Interfaces, glue for integration) and widgets (like 
the star rating or a tagging dialog). Users clearly requested increased 
stability and performance. Much work was put into improving the speed of 
indexing, keeping it out of the way of users and making Nepomuk more reliable.

Even after all this work, paint points remained. In particular, the storage 
system used in Nepomuk continued to present performance challenges that were 
unresolvable on desktop and mobile systems. 

To address this, the developers took a step back to look at how Nepomuk was 
being used in practice. The major use-cases they found are:

<...etc...>


This is a lot less negative about Nepomuk, skips a lot of technical detail tat 
probably isn’t necessary to understand the message and turns it all into a 
nice story of “the Nepomuk developers listened and worked hard to meet the 
needs being communicated to them."

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo

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