[Portland] Thoughts on the integration tasks

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 08 December 2005 16:27, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> decide about fine tuning the look and feel of the file dialogs. Given
> the fact that the look and feel of the file dialog has been a flaming
> debate in the GNOME community in the past, I can imagine it'll be a
> difficult debate for the desktop environment communities to get things
> like "the look and feel of the file dialog" again changed or synch-
> ronized.

we don't need to. let KDE and GNOME both define their own file dialog. who 
cares. what ISVs want is to have the "native" dialog used so that all apps 
look and work the same. users want the same thing. distros want the same 
thing.

Rudi and similar proposals are a way of achieving everyone's desires. without 
having to get everyone to agree on what the dialog ought to look like.

> between two large groups of desktop users. We should avoid they have to
> choose which group they'll please the most. An ISV typically wants to
> target every possible desktop user. And it's silly. And it'll block
> adoption of the free desktop initiative.

exactly.

> But usability is nevertheless important. 

a very important thing for usability is to present a consistent-as-possible 
experience to the user =)

> But for me it's okay that 
> there's multiple ways of implementing a usable desktop.

yes, multiple ways of implementing a desktop is not the problem. not having a 
single mechanism for someone (ISVs, users) to access those multiple 
implementations is.

and here's the grand irony:

do ISVs wish to choose which dialog? no. but they are the ones who have to 
choose.
do users wish to choose which dialog? yes. and they are the ones who can't.

Project Portland can help us reverse those roles.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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