Author: colomar

Behind the scenes of the KDE Phone HIG – Part Two: The HIG creation process

As I wrote in part one of this series, we are currently creating Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) for phone user interfaces for KDE applications. In this part, I want to tell a bit more about the process of creating these guidelines. This is rougly the process we’re planning to follow from the first idea brainstorming …

Behind the scenes of the KDE Phone HIG – Part One: Basic Assumptions

The Task Right after Plasma Mobile was first announced at Akademy 2015, the team put me in charge of the creation of a crucial pillar of the ecosystem: The Human Interface Guidelines for KDE phone applications. This means guidelines for “applications made by KDE for phones”, not “applications made for KDE Phone”, because There is no …

This is what we do if someone offers us some constructive criticism

In July, Eric Griffith wrote an article at Phoronix where he compared Plasma and KDE Applications to GNOME and detailed where they do things better than us and what he finds annoying about our software. We don’t react to angry ranting, but Eric took the time to point out in detail where exactly we could …

Sorry

In Free Software, it’s okay to be imperfect, as long as you’re open and honest about it

Humans are fallible. We all make mistakes sometimes. Most of these mistakes affect only ourselves or those close to us, but sometimes we make mistakes that affect more people. Work in a Free Software project is one of those areas where a mistake can easily affect many people in a community, or thousands of users. …

A light bulb in a thought bubble

Notes From the PIM Sprint: A Vision for the KDE PIM Framework

I know I know, the PIM sprint has already been last November, but in my defence (@David: !!!), the VDG and KDE as a whole has been so buzzing with activity in the meantime that I didn’t find the time to write the blog post I had meant to write about it. So here it …

Screenshot of Firefox in Customize mode

Shared Values ⇒ Shared Ideas? What we can Learn from Firefox Australis

If you’re asking yourself “Huh? Australis? Is that edible?”, then let me explain: Australis is the codename of the new user interface that was introduced with Firefox 29 (see the Article on the Mozilla UX Blog for some background). Australis is the result of years of design and prototyping iterations, which were lead by the …

Screenshot from an earlier version of Kube

Simple by Default, Powerful When Needed

KDE (back when it was still the name of the desktop environment) and our applications historically stood for powerful features and great flexibility and customizeability. This is what our users love about our software, this is why they choose Plasma and KDE software instead of one of the other Free desktop offerings. And it is …

Sitting on the Shoulders of Giants

I could write a whole series of blog posts about my Akademy 2014 experience, but I’m not motivated to do that You might get bored half-way through Therefore I’ll try to summarize some of my impressions (and provide insight into the “rusty trombone conspiracy”). The Talks First of all, the talks: The two keynotes were …

A banner with the text "I'm going 2 Akademy" and "Brno University of Technology"

KDE Usability @ Akademy

I’m always excited to go to Akademy, but this year even more so than in previous years! The reason for this is that I’m going to finally meet at least two guys whom I consider friends by now (Jens Reuterberg and Andrew Lake) in person for the first time ever! But not only I m …

It’s Aliiiiive!

On February, I wrote a blog post entitled “Leveraging the Power of Choice“, in which I described an idea I had discussed with Àlex Fiestas about making it easy for users to choose between different Plasmoids for the same task (e.g. different application launchers, task managers, clocks, …). At the time of my writing the …