KDE 4.3: configuring device actions

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2009-08-07 at 17:18 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Friday 07 August 2009 15:43:33 Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > On Fri, 2009-08-07 at 13:30 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
> > > On Thursday 06 August 2009 22:17:35 Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> >
> > > > Since 4.3 seems to carry on the tradition of not
> > > > documenting anything useful*, can anyone enlighten me?
> > >
> > > Thank you.  So we'll all stop working on it until you join in and help
> > > us.
> >
> > No need to overreact. I'll admit to a certain snittiness in my remarks,
> > but it's not like this is the first time anyone has ever said anything
> > about KDE documentation. I've frequently complained about it in the past
> > and was disappointed to find that 4.3 still has holes. In fact it even
> > has missing documentation files (click on the Help button in a plasma
> > applet and get "The file or folder help:/plasma-desktop/index.html does
> > not exist".) This was also the case with earlier versions of KDE and I
> > also commented on it at the time.
> >
> > The whole point I'm trying to make is that most of the easy stuff is
> > documented, but a lot of the harder stuff isn't. Clearly if I was in a
> > position to write docs for the hard stuff I wouldn't need to ask the
> > question in my post.
> >
> No, the whole point is that documentation has to be written.  Every study 
> shows that developers are not the best people to write it, anyway.  They don't 
> see things from the same perspective as the user, and then of course many 
> (most?) of them don't speak English as a first language.
> 
> The best way undoubtedly is for those that care to start helping write 
> documentation - and UserBase makes that easy to do (any help needed in 
> starting new sections etc., please ask me).  If you do that, developers will 
> be so grateful that they'll fall over themselves to answer your questions so 
> that you can expand the help.

It's unfortunate that this has veered off into a discussion of the docs.
If you glance at my original post, that point I was trying to make was
that the configuration dialogue is poorly designed. If it were
well-designed, the docs would be much less important.

However I take your point about offering to help. You did that once
before and I never acted on it. If you point me in the right direction
I'll see what I can do.

[...]

> > That also works with Dolphin and is a valid alternative. However it
> > doesn't really answer the question. More to the point, a user who sees
> > the notification pop-up and clicks on the icon will still have to click
> > twice more to get to the file browser, which I conjecture to be by far
> > the most common case. That's just bad design.
> >
> How do you know that's the common case?  It is for you, and it is for me, but 
> for others an image viewer or media player may be their most common need.

Perhaps, but we'll never know. That's why configurability is important.

> I'm 
> totally against forcing anyone down any path.

Since we're talking about configurability, I obviously agree with you.

> For heaven's sake, I can live 
> with a couple of clicks.  Is it really that important?

Cosmically speaking, of course not. When you use the pendrive several
times a day, every time it happens it's an irritation, like squeaky
chalk on a blackboard. Since I use KDE exclusively, I want it to work
the way I think it *should* work, just for my own sake.

BTW http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Device
+Manager?content=106051 shows an interesting alternative to the device
notifier, but it doesn't seem to be available for Fedora (the Install
New Widgets dialogue can't find it.)

poc