User:AaronPeterson

From KDE TechBase

Aaron Peterson lives in Washington State USA. and has contriubted to various wikis including openwiki.org one of the gentoo wikis and wikipedias metawiki. as of 2010.07 Aaron is a novice programmer, who has done a bit of WMI, Javascript, C, and has followed a few C++ and QT tutorials, so he is very much learning and new to the process.

Request for HELP

None currently, Aaron helped wean me from my psychological dependence on kdesrc-build

Wiki

style

Aaron generally organizes then polishes, Some users may be offended by misspellings or hanging links to pages that do not exist, and making placeholders for content that he thinks should go there.


He likes using categories whenever possible.

Style II

I find that wiki's especially, mediawiki, get misused when in techbase role. It is important to use Categories, and NOT subdirectories so that wiki linking becomes easy. Filing something under Getting Started is a horrible way to do it, because the item will also be related to the [[Topic]] In general, sub pages should be used only if the topic page is too large, and the additional content is exclusive to the topic. I hope to re-arrange the wiki to make it easier to navigate.

ethics

Aaron will move content about and adjust sentence structure to get right to the point. He rarely deletes content, rather, prefers to move it to new pages.

frequency Noise

I talk a lot, I am learning about projects that i interact with, and hope that I am actually contributing. I want to give a high signal to noise, and I have a lot of time right now (July 2010) and am running with high enthusiasm.


Person

Contact Info

Aaron generally cares a great deal about the projects he works on and would very much enjoy talking with what they are working on, and requests help learning this stuff.

Telephone: 206 334 5925

Creativity

Part of my creativity comes from experimentation. I try a lot of things, and I believe i have a talent for testing software, and creating user interfaces.

Bugs

I file a lot of bugs and wishlist items. Often the fix is not trivial, and does not fit exactly in the category I put the item... because I have no idea where it should go. For example, I don't think we should program based on click, double click, drag, I think we need more abstract concepts .

I have filed bugs for bugzilla at mozilla regarding micropayment integration, and I tend to prefer Mantis as a bug/feature tracker. I also very much think that searching for existing bugs should go thru closed bugs and not just open bugs.


KDE

Aaron has enjoyed using applications made in KDE and QT for quite some time, and has posted bugs. He would like to be considered a usability contributer and is attempting to set up a build environment to actually fix some of the behavior he cares deeply about.

Learning

/tutorials that are good /tutorials that do not work

Specific bugs and enhancements

  • selecting items in dolphin and konqueror / dialogs are over-engineered and while simplify some very basic selection capability, complicates general use of the program.
  • Single vs double click -- Aaron cares very deeply about accidental clicks activating programs, and would like to seporate desired appliacation behavior vs application use by creating a concept to make user interfaces easier.
    • Reversable-Safe-to-activate -- no-data-loss -- a button, single click, even moving a cursor over can trigger an event and this triggers no possiblity of data loss.
    • known-common-use - reversable - arranging content, a single button can trigger.
    • known-non-reversable
  an example would be a slide-lock on an iphone, a double click, or similar
    • known-dangerous
  a confirmation dialog/interuption of user is required.
    • unknown
  a confirmation dialog may be requried.

plasma


  • show contents of directory--within a panel, not an icon to start a new window..
  • application plasmoids, task-bar like objects that organize application windows and documents, that stay persistant.. AND also provide taskbar like control ((all other implementations seen either are just like taskbars or completely hide content)
  • Note taking / journal plasmoid, that actually prepends to a simple text file. Saves like an instant messanger log, perhaps just instant message self in a note., (from anywhere) and have it save on the server.
  • /In panel run command There is a run plasmoid, it just manifests as an icon, and I don't want to click on an icon, then click again and type what I want to run.

-- The active user interface field is IN the plasmoid, so one less click. (first seen with IE4beta but then removed.. also seen in KDE3)

  • Make applets have a choice weather to behave like a popupapplet or an applet

(wishlist/bug filed: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=245124 ) Spent many many hours reading api / source code etc trying to figure this out ;) still


<notmart> MrDarkUser: you reimplement void Applet::createConfigurationInterface(KConfigDialog *parent)


KDE settings

/kdesettingsFixes

  • wants to make kde settings behave as expected with single click, because they are all buttons/hyperlinks Not fileRepresentation.

Dolphin

  • adding more columns /MoreMetaDataInDolphin
  • Adding a view that allows grouping based on metadata
  • Making Details be accessible in Icon view
  • Make an Icon view that can be rearranged, not snapped to a grid.
  • Make Thumbnails be in their own column/ make filetype icon still show up even in iconview
  • Make DetailedIcon view, where metadata gets shown in same tile as icon.

Knotify

. Need to have a filter on incoming messages, and present a log view. Would like to implement a time and check condition capability, conditions to check would be file is filesize, window has gotten focus, other things to help knotify if it should pop up that annyoing dialog. Also the application can send information like how many it expects to send.

Would like all kinds of things to get logged. Deletion of files, trash cleared..... tons of stuff would be great to keep track of. sorting it would be a pain tho.

social networking

kreactor overheard a conversation and started thinking about using it to make a social networking portal alternative -- standards based websites that people put up themselves (already a project) (facebook afterall, is just a glorified, centralized log analyzer that can trigger alarms) We could eventually string all of our instant messages thru our log analyzer, have it show us what we want, and retransmit based on rules if certain conditions are met.

Development

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-6368828.html#6368828

I still don't kknow how Template:Help /kdesrc-build-stories

Build it

/build

This Wiki

Welcome_to_KDE_TechBase/20100805/


Concerns with your contributions at Getting Started

While it is great that you are editing this wiki, I really do not feel the edits you have made to this article aid new contributors.

Looking at the after/before edits (respectively): http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Getting_Started&oldid=43418

The latter definitely seems more cleanly organized and easier for a beginning contributor to disect. Keep in mind that the people we are attempting to target, will almost *definitely* be unsure of their abilities, unsure of whether working on KDE is easy, or even possible. It is best to not throw a ton of information their way all at once. It needs to be easy for them to digest...Not only that, there are a ton of dead links everywhere..so the visitor really gets the impression that we are..lacking, I suppose.

Personally, I like the old-style one that I listed, more. While it wasn't perfect, it was simple and somewhat concise. And the banner-like objects helped break it down, and looked attractive while doing so. Then from there, the user was led to a series of more technical articles(although I think it was pretty much one big one after that..the separation is still very important. although, even in the older versions, there is of course still room for improvement).

I am planning on reverting your changes, either by a full revert, or by a manual bit-by-bit one...depending on how much information was gained/lost between the versions. This is if I don't hear a response from you in some random amount of time...

I really do not want new-comers to see the page like this, which is why I am being semi-expedient with this. contact me at [email protected] so we can discuss this. Or just reply to this. (I couldn't find your e-mail, so I just posted this thing here).

Fulldecent 01:26, 16 December 2010 (UTC) I agree that this is less appealing. I currently maintain kde.org/getinvolved and hear about people that are having trouble getting KDE set up. I will attempt to edit this page in the following way: I will add a graphic up front that describes the different choices a user has. Then, I will attempt to move some of the detailed links on this page (eg setting up with git) down into another related page (eg setting up with svn) so that this is focused on getting a user to quickly make a decision on the path they want and get started. Will Entriken 484-843-1313, [email protected]

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