Apparently, with my original posting here, I stepped on several people's toes. I'm sorry for that, and for this reason, I've simply removed this content (and also because - as some of you pointed out - some of the things I mentioned were not Plasma's fault, but workarounds or bugs in other areas, although to me as a user they appeared on Plasma).

Writing good error messages for your programs is art. Your user gets an error message - he cannot ask his computer "how do you mean this?". Error messages are important because they can help you fix a problem. Some error messages are critical because the error prevents you from achieving anything. One example are the error message of startkde. When you have a problem with startkde, you have a real problem. If you cannot solve it, you cannot work (with KDE) at all.

Today Olaf published the second checklist in the scope of the HIG Hunting Session - it is about Text and Fonts.

Just like last week, we ask users of the KDE 4 Alpha release to review applications along checklists and report infringements in the bug tracking system. More details in the weekly dot article!

Happy Hunting!

Yesterday, the usability review cycle for KDE4 started. As the HCI working group is poor on man-power, we started an experiment to include the community into the search for obvious infringements of the KDE Human Interface Guidelines: The HIG Hunting Season.

If you recently had a look at the HIG's start page, you'll quickly spot that it's far from being finished. That's why we are preparing HIG checklists which list the most common user interface and interaction problems in KDE3.

Such issues can be stated like bugs, and that's what we ask the community for:

Please review KDE4 applications along the HIG checklists - and report bugs whenever you find an infringement!

Reviews can be performed by anyone - users, developers, technical writers, translators, developers, usability people.. anyone! If you don't have a running KDE4 environment, check out beineri's KDE four live CD or wait for the alpha release which should be available tomorrow or so.

The checklists are published on a weekly basis on the dot. For the first checklist about configuration dialogs and instructions how to proceed, please have a look at this week's dot story.

Developers who receive HIG-related bug reports which require further usability analysis please send a mail to kde-usability-devel.

Happy hunting!

As the result of a long discussion on kde-core-devel, I summarised the suggested application and system shortcuts for KDE4:

• Standard Keyboard Shortcuts
• About Shortcuts and Accelerators

[The table isn't formatted yet - are there volunteers to make it look like these ones? I really hate tables in MediaWiki...]

The suggested shortcuts are a summary of the discussion on kde-core-devel. The alternate shortcuts we originally suggested are left out as far as possible, but we kept the shortcuts which are required to obtain full keyboard access.

One more question to the community: The KDE3 default scheme reserves several shortcuts for text completion - I wonder if they still need to be reserved, or if we should free them for applications?

Apart from shortcuts, the HIG made some progress in the following sections:

• Feedback
• Warning Messages
• Dockers
• Drag and Drop
• Links
• Window Layout

All accessible via the front page. Feedback appreciated (here or to ellen kde org).

Finally, the dialog section in the HIG has made some progress. Thank to Olaf who knows Qt Designer much better than I do, we found a way to create a clean dialog layout for KDE4. The trick is to use the same ratio of spacers on bottom of each group box. Read more in the guidelines!

We are planning to provide some video tutorials how to best use Designer - stay tuned. We'll also upload the ui files when we found a good location (the wiki allows only images).

I appreciate feedback on this, as well as on the other guidelines drafted on this page: "General" and "Modality". Please comment here or write a mail to ellen kde org.