The purpose of this message is to express appreciation for the recent article
concerning many of the failings of CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) at
NewsForge.
Printing from my Debian Linux box has proven to be a task of difficulty
comparable to that of the scaling of Mount Everest by a quadripalegic. Not
impossible, but certainly not easy. My solution to the entire issue of
printing is use the PDF printer and e-mail the resulting file to my wife's
Windows box for output on our laser printer.
The CUPS article nicely shoehorns onto a rant I have in regards to the KDE GUI.
My most loved operating system is the Macintosh OS. There is eye-candy
aplenty available within the Mac OS, from the cleanly rendered fonts, cleanly
rendered printing (another issue on Linux), to the cleanly structured dialogs
and other system prompts. I suspect that the Mac OS is so revered and admired
for it's "Just Working"-reputation in large part because of the eye-candy.
After such a comment an explanation must follow.
If a Macintosh system dialog is examined for appearance, all components of the
dialog are in harmony. The text is located in the window such that a proper
boundary is maintained around the text, buttons are located so that separation
from other elments of the dialog is maintained, etc. Most of this is the
result of having good designers and the rest is the result of good eye-candy.
I will explain that last comment.
(For the code heads: This description may be dependent upon the continuing
evolution of the Qt toolkit.)
Let us begin with an ideal window which consists of text, a few buttons, and a
few other input widgets. Each object in the window has a set of characterists.
The system will manage the set of objects and such visual characteristics as
size, etc. so that the appearance of the window and everything displayed
creates proper proportions to all other widgets in the window. Much like the
number Phi (1.618...) is integral to the dimensions of the most famous works of
architecture, painting, etc.
The system can product a window that is self-adjusting and aware of the default
choices of the user. Modification to the existing KDE codebase should be
minimal and these adjustment should be achieved by patching of the Qt-codebase
to increase inter-object communication.
Such global communication between objects with the GUI would strengthen the KDE
environment.
Robert Tilley
P.S. I've been writing for a few hours interspersed with web-research
and am mentally exhausted. Anyone is welcome to assist me in evolving
this idea.
