well, celeste, you have a gift waiting for you in kde4 from one luca gugelmann:
luca appeared on irc recently looking for things to do. i steered him towards celeste's blog (among other things; he's been producing a few patches lately =) and a couple days later there it is. cool ...
now, that said ... i don't scale very well. people come on irc and ask me for tasks fairly regularly. this means i have to take a break from my own coding to pay attention to the request and come up with something. sometimes i'm not even there on irc (i know, amazing and shocking! ;).
so let me suggest that if you'd like to get involved with kde4 that you try the following instead:
- pick an app in one of the modules, such as kdeutils or kdeadmin, and try it out. i guarantee you'll find layout or other issues that need to be resolved before 4.0. if you have questions about the app, ask on irc in #kde4-devel or on the kde-devel mailing list. this is the self-starter method.
- subscribe and then send an email to the kde-devel@kde.org mailing list letting people know you are looking for tasks.
for other kde regulars working on kde4 already: can we please put together lists of things that need to get done that people might be able to pick away at? i know that kopete has such a page, as does plasma. this would make it so much easier for people such as myself to steer others your way and speed up devel where it needs to happen.
in fact, perhaps someone would like to set up a page in the "contribute" area of techbase for these things?
3 comments:
wow, you guys are great!
aseigo & luca > *
I know this is not a feature request site. But it seems to me that a nice (beginner?) Task that would certainly raise a lot of Kudos would be a progress bar in Ark (if not already worked on) :)
For BasKet Note Pads, I designed a mockup for the screen-grabbing tool, with a good usability in mind. But as time lacked, I only copied the KSnapshot code and pasted it without change.
A picture is worth thousand words, so here is the mockup first and the explanation of what could be enhanced and why will follow (I adapted my idea with the nice handles that I haven't tought to):
http://slaout.linux62.org/kde-wishs/zone-grabber-mockup.png
1. My problem with current and proposed laso is that you never know if the 1 pixel black (or blue, or dotted) border is part of the picked zone or not.
My solution is not to put the black line part of the grabbed zone, and draw a gradient that fade outside of the grabbed zone, so that there is no confusion anymore: black (opaque or somewhat less opaque) zone is not part of the grabbed zone, the normal zone is.
2. Additionaly, coloring the selected zone in blue is not a good idea in my opinion, because this is precisely where we focus our attention.
Coloring the non-selected zone in black and keeping the selected zone intact would allow to get a sort of "live-preview" of the result we would get: the non-black area sort of visualy pops up as the image that will be grabbed. This is what GIMP has and it is fairly efficient.
3. I agree the handles should be inside the grabbed zone, because if the user selects something arround the screen border, the handles should still be visible. But they get painted over the grabbed zone, the zone the user is precisely focusing right now to make it the perfect size and position.
That's why I put them half inside and half outside, to minimize the size they take over the image. And if the user selects something arround the screen corner, it doesn't matter the handles are smaller (only the inside part is visible) because Fitt's laws now apply (the handles are virtually bigger).
The inside part of the handle is not plain-blue but only blue-outlined. If the user is wanting a precise size, he is surely wanting to have the selection perfectly start/stop at one or more of the corners of the grabbed-zone. The 4 corners should then not be color-altered.
Voilà. This is an idea I got one year ago and I will not have time to implement it in the following year :-) Now that the idea is on your blog, perhapse somebody else can do it.
All those remarks are perhapse only details, but I'm convinced that when added, they help usability, KDE fit and finish and... that's a cute eye-candy, isn't it?
What do you think?
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