An option like Apple's 'simplified Finder' would be a very good idea indeed. Select 'simplified' and only the strictly necessary options remain... That would make KDE more accessible for many people.
I agree that bumptop is a ghastly idea. It doesn't help to make finding and accessing files easier in any way. Tagging (perhaps hierarchical auto-sorting based on tags and filetypes) and desktop-search seem the way to go. What is it we (all users) basically want from a the GUI of our OS? We want to use applications in order to perform certain tasks, create new files and access old files. In order to fullfil the first two tasks you want to find the right application quickly. That's fairly easy; e...
Quoted Originally posted by alecs1 What I don't wan't is to simplify things just for the people who don't have anything to do with computers. I got to say that exactly that has been the aim that has driven any development in user interfaces since the Stanford Research Institute in 1963 invented the computer mouse and Xerox used it for their Xerox Alto in 1973. And I'm positive that KDE 4 is following in that tradition. If only users who know a system and are comfortable with it were the target ...
" a simple desktop" Yeah; I, too, think that the time has come to hide the configurability a bit behind a sleek and seemingly clear-structured desktop. The best mock-ups I've seen so far, are GNOME-mockups, to be honest: http://tinyurl.com/qjerb But I find it somehow reassuring that KDE-mockups seem to point in the same direction: http://img460.imageshack.us/my.php?image=tab0az8zc.png (Notice how similar the mock-ups look? I think we are seeing some 'Zeitgeist' here... ) Also Novell is going the...
XGL enables us to think about some intriguing new, more 'human' concepts in earnest for the first time... First, why not get rid of rectangular constraints and turn the desktop into a sphere of variable size? This would open up totally new possibilities for re-designing the man-machine interface. How would you like switching to a virtual machine - or to the network - by zooming out of the sphere that is your desktop and turning to another sphere...? Or zooming _into_ the sphere in order to brows...
Indeed. This would get a whole lot of that stuff that usually clutters the desktop organized into one menu! Either this or showing progress-bars in a list that's integrated into the wallpaper itselfwould be great.
I like this idea, it's great. And apparently the people at Novell thought the same and integrated this into their new GNOME-based enterprise desktop: http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/preview.html They call it 'application browser' and I would really, really like to use something like that!