samhain wrote:Usability is a buzzword. KDE4 is not usable under many aspects (did I mention the focus-bug?). It's just a justification for developers to do things they think that are good for the user, which has nothing to do with what the user thinks that's needed.

No, it isn't just a buzzword, it is a quantitative, empirical way to analyze how the human brain handles user interfaces and to design user interfaces around those principles. Insulting and dismissing an entire field of study does not help your case. Once again, your rude and non-constructive behavior is getting tiresome.

As for the focus model, please stop calling it a bug. It is a feature request. You prefer it, but so far you have provided no evidence whatsoever that it is a better approach. You still don't seem to get the idea that you are just one person, you are not the boss of KDE. Just because you happen to want something does not mean everyone else does, and does not mean it is going to happen. Your repeated demands that KDE does exactly what you want and only what you want right now are getting tiresome. You gave a not-pology for this ("I apologize for being rude but it was all your fault") and then turned around and did it again. You need to understand that you are part of a community, and in a community not everyone is going to get exactly what they want right away all of the time.

samhain wrote:Mixing GUI elements from various application - that you state as bad - is exactly what's sold as the "new desktop paradigm" with plasmoids. Only the shell that was konqueror before is now the desktop. The new restrictions that arose from that are tried to overcome with "activities".

No, because plasma doesn't behave as one big application from a UI standpoint, it behaves as a bunch of small, independent applications with their own independent UIs. They are visually distinct and spatially separated. You can have a separate web browser and text editor next to each other, but you don't have a web browser toolbar right next to, in the same application, a text editor toolbar, for instance. From a UI standpoint the plasmoids are separate applications, not the same application, unlike konqueror where a single window might be acting as a web browser and a text editor at the same time. The two situations are completely different.

"Is it a bug? No, it's a feature!"

Ok, so let's call the bugs "feature requests". Mind you, I'm from the old world. We call what's happening here euphemism. A community is not a cuddlyclub or a sunday school.

Usability is not culture neutral nor is it context free. That's proven, too. And to stress the fact a bit more, there is not a single study that tries to states the opposite. So please don't stress the goodgiven usability.

Your view of plasmoids is a pure developers view. It's nice, but from the users point of view it's inconsistent and - hohoho - buggy. Like the focus model. And I know NLP, too.

You are not the only one from the old world. And what we have from you is what we call behaving like a spoilt child. Gimme, gimme, gimme. I want my own way or I'll throw a tantrum.

samhain wrote:Ok, so let's call the bugs "feature requests". Mind you, I'm from the old world. We call what's happening here euphemism. A community is not a cuddlyclub or a sunday school.

By definition, if something is following intended behavior it is not a bug. You do not like the intended behavior, but that doesn't change the fact that it is the intended behavior. Basically you are saying "anything I don't like is a bug, no matter whether the developers want it that way or not". Either you don't know what a bug is, or you once again are showing that you think the KDE community should bend to your every whim. I would guess the latter. Why is it so hard for you to understand that other people use KDE besides you and have different ideas than you do about what is the proper behavior?

samhain wrote:Usability is not culture neutral nor is it context free. That's proven, too. And to stress the fact a bit more, there is not a single study that tries to states the opposite. So please don't stress the goodgiven usability.

Usability in general isn't, but there are certain usability rules that are totally independent of context and culture because they are based on fundamental rules of human biology. Fitt's law, for instance, is not culture-dependent because it based on basic physics and the way the human motor system works. Similarly, having a huge number of objects to interact with that are never used is going to hurt usability because of how the human brain works, there are fundamental limits as to how many objects a human can store in working memory, fundamental limits as to how many visual objects a human can process at once, fundamental limits as to how long it takes someone to read and understand something. It doesn't matter your culture or your context, those rules don't change much.

samhain wrote:Your view of plasmoids is a pure developers view. It's nice, but from the users point of view it's inconsistent and - hohoho - buggy. Like the focus model. And I know NLP, too.

Once again, here you go and call something buggy just because you don't like it. Why is it so hard for you to understand that the world does not revolve around you, that just because you want something a certain way does not automatically mean everyone else does?

And it isn't a pure developers view, it is based once again on how the human brain works. You have things completely backwards, from a purely developers point of view, plasma is a single app and is really no different from konqueror. But from a user point of view the two are completely different, plasma is not a single app. Plasmoids are treated as perceptually distinct objects, just like applications, that can be looked at and handled independently without needing to be distracted much by the others. This is based on basic gestalt grouping laws (which are also not culture-dependent) and rules of human attention (which are also not culture-dependent).

TheBlackCat wrote:You gave a not-pology for this ("I apologize for being rude but it was all your fault") and then turned around and did it again.

I guess the "not-pology" is mine, not samhain's. Don't blame him.

The excuses were to clarify that I, by no means, want to be rough. It does not mean, anyway, that I assume that my opinion is invalid.

On the other side, annew gives herself the right to give people resposes like:

annew wrote:You are not the only one from the old world. And what we have from you is what we call behaving like a spoilt child. Gimme, gimme, gimme. I want my own way or I'll throw a tantrum.

And this IS NOT a neat behaviour. So when talking about "not-pologies", I think its worth to give an impartial analysis. We better stop our peeves and pay more attention to the contents of each post.

I see several ones saying that Konqueror is not that hard to learn. TheBlackCat says it is and that his arguments are founded. I won't contest, but I'd like to see the facts that led to this conclusion.
In my understanding, the advantages Dolphin has over Konqueror (and that I talked some posts ago) are about the breadcrumb, filter bar and other minor things that could, with no doubt, be part of any KDE application. Even Konqueror could have this.

If you that have more proximity say that Konqueror is not worth enough to live because its codebase, so, at least, listen to the several users that are saying that Konqueror functionalities are good, and put an effort to replicate them in any other name you want. I don't care it you take a single line of code from the original Konqueror or not. I do care that you spontaneously choose to loose the good things Konqueror gave to users. In the end, why do an entire community develops if it is not about their users?

I will not feel happy having a file manager that is nothing more than a KDE version of Nautilus or Rwindows Explorer when I used to have something better before.

1) KDE does everything right.
2) Where it failes, it's proven it's doing the right thing.
3) When you still think, it's a bug, go to 1)

I have spent a few months (in some cases a few years) with the , Windows Explorer, Nautlius...and a few others whose names escape me.

It really wasn't hard to transfer between them all, with Konqueror being the exception.

It has a long and noble history, and I will concede it's a powerful tool; but I want a program that will allow me to mount/unmount disks, copy/cut/paste and call upon the right program when I click on a file. The fact that Dolphin can use tabs, go into split mode and give me a preview pane and a search box are really quite handy. Konq does that. it also tries to give me a back-rub and make the tea.

Which is also nice, but obtrusive. It's overkill for me, the UI had a steep learning curve and it's extra features and buttons are going to waste on me. A program that can do everything I want and need is nice. A program that does more then that is wasted effort and wasted RAM.

I will concede that you have a use for it, as I'm sure many others do. But please don't think your speaking for the entire community when your not, I can physically find you 200+ or so people who love Dolphin, but haven't got the faintest idea of what to do if I change their desktop around.

Dolphin may not be designed with packed-to-bursting ideas behind it, but it does it's job extremely well, and better then the rest for it's intended purpose. Whilst I havent read the whole forum, the contenders here seem to forget that they are not the only ones here and being 'psuedo-reasonable', pretending they are speaking for the whole community and ignoring a field complete with it's own doctorates and PhD's is simply...well...barbaric.

Dolphin at least needs:

1) The ability to split the screen more than two ways.
2) A way to extend the tree view the full length of the pane without nuking the places menu; I shouldn't have to scroll in my directory tree.
3) An embedded text editor.
4) ftp that actually works.

That is all file manager functionality, not random extras.

If you think Dolphin lacks then join the project and/or file bugs/wishes

If you think Konqueror lacks then join the project and/or file bugs/wishes

If neither meets your needs then try Krusader or one of the many non-kde file managers available, create your own fm, or fork one of the existing. Maybe even consider using the kd3 version of Konq in kde4 or use kde3 (there's still distro's supporting it).

Finally, "drop Dolphin" in the title is derogatory to the developers and whether you like the project or not they deserve respect for their work, especially since their time is donated.

2handband wrote:Dolphin at least needs:

1) The ability to split the screen more than two ways.
2) A way to extend the tree view the full length of the pane without nuking the places menu; I shouldn't have to scroll in my directory tree.
3) An embedded text editor.
4) ftp that actually works.

That is all file manager functionality, not random extras.

1) Post a request in Brainstorm. I think it would be fairly well-received
2) You can move the tree view panel over top of the places panel, whereupon they will show up as tabs in the same panel.
3) Not going to happen because that's not in the scope of Dolphin. Kwrite generally opens quick enough, why do you need it inside of Dolphin? If you deal exclusively with text files which you frequently want open in an editor, you can also use Kate which has its own file system explorer. Or if you really need the embedded text editor in your file manager, Konqueror still has that.
4) Sounds like you have a bug or something misconfigured somewhere. If FTP works in Konqueror then it should work equally well in Dolphin and all other KDE apps.

airdrik wrote:

2handband wrote:Dolphin at least needs:

1) The ability to split the screen more than two ways.
2) A way to extend the tree view the full length of the pane without nuking the places menu; I shouldn't have to scroll in my directory tree.
3) An embedded text editor.
4) ftp that actually works.

That is all file manager functionality, not random extras.

1) Post a request in Brainstorm. I think it would be fairly well-received
2) You can move the tree view panel over top of the places panel, whereupon they will show up as tabs in the same panel.
3) Not going to happen because that's not in the scope of Dolphin. Kwrite generally opens quick enough, why do you need it inside of Dolphin? If you deal exclusively with text files which you frequently want open in an editor, you can also use Kate which has its own file system explorer. Or if you really need the embedded text editor in your file manager, Konqueror still has that.
4) Sounds like you have a bug or something misconfigured somewhere. If FTP works in Konqueror then it should work equally well in Dolphin and all other KDE apps.

1) I'm surprised someone hasn't done that long since.
2) That's an improvement, but now I have an extra click to switch tabs. The narrow navigation panel in Konqueror makes a lot more sense to me. I'm all about less clicks.
3) I use Kate for most things, but if I need to open something fast and just do a quick correction or something I prefer not to open something in a separate window. Once again, less clicks, not to mention less mouse movement. I have repetitive strain issues.
4) Maybe I'm doing it wrong; is the procedure for ftp in Dolphin different than it is in Konqueror?

Look, I don't really mind Dolphin that much so long as Konqueror is an easy option. I just don't understand how people can say it's easier to use when similar tasks routinely take more clicks and more time.

Ah, your talking about that rather unique function that opens a file inside Konq instead of an application designed for it?

That, to me, was useful, but I multitask and having one window do everything, whilst nice, would be a nightmare, tabs just dont cut it sometimes.

2handband wrote:1) The ability to split the screen more than two ways.

This has been explicitly rejected by developers, for better or worse.

2handband wrote:2) That's an improvement, but now I have an extra click to switch tabs. The narrow navigation panel in Konqueror makes a lot more sense to me. I'm all about less clicks.

How is the konqueror panel different? You still need to switch tabs to get to the places menu. And you also have the list view in dolphin which you can set to act as a tree view.

2handband wrote:3) An embedded text editor.

Doing this would defeat the whole purpose of making dolphin in the first place.

2handband wrote:4) Maybe I'm doing it wrong; is the procedure for ftp in Dolphin different than it is in Konqueror?

It shouldn't be, since Konqueror basically uses Dolphin for FTP anyway.

2handband wrote:That is all file manager functionality, not random extras.

By definition text editing is NOT file manager functionality, it is text editor functionality. That is why dolphin doesn't have it, dolphin is a file manager period, not a text editor, not a web browser, not an image editor, not a document viewer. It is just a file manager.

2handband wrote:I just don't understand how people can say it's easier to use when similar tasks routinely take more clicks and more time.

That depends on the task. Dolphin is optimized for common tasks, so common tasks take less clicks and less time. Less common tasks, however, may take more clicks.

Blackcat... you don't have to switch tabs in Konqueror. You have a narrow strip down the left-hand side of the window with the places icons, and the tree immediately to the right of that. They display simultaneously without getting in each other's way.

For what ever reason, typing in my website URL as follows: ftp://gkodadek@www.linuxadventures.net/ works fine in Konqueror but not in Dolphin. there are no error messages, just a blank window.

I'm not trying to be argumentative here; actually I'm doing a Dolphin overview for my website and am trying to be as fair to it as I can. So perhaps you'd be willing to explain to me what common tasks take less time and less clicks? Because honestly I don't see it, and right now I'm taking off major points for what I see as clumsiness. What specifically do you find easier in Dolphin?

Thinking about it now, if I removed all excess apps from my netbook and simply used Konq for everything...I might be looking at better performance...hmmm