one giant leap for kde

i am back from Berlin and settling into my cozy nook in Canada again, staring down the barrel of KDE4 development and trying to piece it all together ...

for KDE4 to matter, our development processes will need to continue to evolve. while KDE has proven itself proficient at creating technology thus far within the confines of what we have needed to accomplish, we have (broadly) three distinct challenges that KDE4 will bring with it:

The Developer's Challenge: Being Creative. there is a combination of feeling there is safety in going where others have been and doing KDE development as a sideline rather than a primary creative focus that contributes to a distinct lack of creativity in how we put our applications together. this has been, in a way, a godsend for KDE up until now as it has let us catch up with pre-existing closed source environments by pragmatically reproducing analogous features, often in better ways. but as we approach the state of the art, to go further requires creativity. we will have less and less to copy from as we launch into the brave new world of being leaders on the desktop. KDE4 needs to be more than just KDE3 updated to Qt4.

The Designer's Challenge: Creating Clarity. many of our user interfaces are a mess. they are featureful and interesting, but many times lack the quality of "clarity". at the same time, clarity has become one of the primary decision making factors for users of desktop software. as all other things have become increasingly equal, clarity is becoming a more important issue. while we have continued to expect every developer to create their own interfaces (which has led to our current state), there is now a need for interface designers to step up and produce clarity in the interfaces. concurrently, there is a need for coders to respect and support those efforts.

The Artist's Challenge: Breathtaking Beauty. the appearance of our desktop has come leaps and bounds forward. the next step will be the hardest: to create something so instantly welcoming that it inspires the user. Apple accomplished this when they first release MacOS X, for instance. and it wasn't just great icons and a funky theme, though that certainly was part of it. it was also widget and window transitions, visual concepts in the finder and more...

each person in the KDE project is faced with at least some of each of these three challenges. it will take a unified push between coders, artists and designers to fully realize the potential in KDE4.

and this is what has been on my mind over the last few days: where will i draw my creativity from and focus it on? what areas of our interface could i help make clearer? how can i support and work with the artists in our community to help them achieve the goal of breathtaking beauty?

big questions indeed ...