Hi Heiko, hi everyone, 2013/2/28 Heiko Tietze <[email protected]>: > Hi all, > > to go ahead with the discussion on Dolphin's sidebar we prepared a blog > article what we want to do next. Please discuss the aim of the planned study > with us. > > http://user-prompt.com/quo-vadis-dolphin-preparation-of-the-developer-study/
thanks for this post! Concerning the "current ideas and feelings" of the developers, I can only speak for myself, and not for the others who contribute to Dolphin. 1. I would say that the Personas are still valid. 2. About the purpose of the "Places" panel (I guess you mean mainly this one when you talk about "sidebars"), I would say that it should help users to quickly go to frequently needed locations. Besides those that they can configure themselves and which are shown in the top section of the panel, this includes storage devices (internal or removable) which are accessible, and Nepomuk-searches, e.g., for recently accessed files. The "Places" which are configurable and the links to the storage devices are shared with the "File Open/Save" dialog and have been there for quite some time. The searches have been added in Dolphin 2.1/KDE 4.9 by the former maintainer Peter Penz. I don't know if he did some usability research before that. It seems to me that the search for recently accessed items is being used by a considerable number of users - at least we did get quite a few bug reports related to that. From a developer's point of view, this is the most reliable indicator that people use the functionality ;-) I'm less sure about the searches for Documents/Images/etc., I did not get much feedback about that. 3. About developers' feature ideas and "Where do the developers want Dolphin to go?": I took over Dolphin's maintainership in the mid of last year when Peter left. I think I was the most active contributor except for himself during the last years, which is probably the reason why he asked me to take over. Unfortunately, I don't really have much free time to work on Dolphin, which means that I cannot spend much time working on new features, considering that handling at least a part of the endless stream of incoming bug reports, patch review and discussions on mailing lists and in the forum are quite time-consuming (but also very important) tasks. My main goals are currently to make continuous small improvements by fixing bugs and little annoyances and to make it attractive for others to work on Dolphin, because I believe that a large group of contributors is the best way to secure the project's future. I hope that this answers some questions - other contributors might add their own ideas and views. Feel free to ask if anything is unclear! Best regards, Frank _______________________________________________ Nepomuk mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/nepomuk
