It really seems that the kde team have taken leave of their senses. I just upgraded to squeeze in the continuing effort to deal with xsession errors - they have changed now in kind, but there are still a bunch of them - one side effect of which was to update kmail.
The thing now comes with two 'features' which seem designed to destroy usability, and no guide on how to get rid of the things. One is that messages are separated by day and week, with drop down tabs. Why anyone would want this is a mystery. It makes scrolling through your old messages just about impossible. The other is that wherever you move the mouse these crazed popups appear, to obscure whatever you were looking at. This was probably put in in case you should persist in trying to scroll through, and make it doubly impossible!
A bit of google searching revealed an obscure button and a setting deep in the bowels of the thing which let you turn them both off and get back to something that looks like a normal email client. But really, what on earth has happened to these guys? Kmail used to be, out of the box, a nice simple email client packaged with a quite decent calendar. You can still get back to that, but you have to make an effort.
Al
Hi,
On 15/07/2009, Peter Alcibiades palcibiades-first@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
It really seems that the kde team have taken leave of their senses. I just upgraded to squeeze in the continuing effort to deal with xsession errors - they have changed now in kind, but there are still a bunch of them - one side effect of which was to update kmail.
The thing now comes with two 'features' which seem designed to destroy usability, and no guide on how to get rid of the things. One is that messages are separated by day and week, with drop down tabs. Why anyone would want this is a mystery. It makes scrolling through your old messages just about impossible. The other is that wherever you move the mouse these crazed popups appear, to obscure whatever you were looking at. This was probably put in in case you should persist in trying to scroll through, and make it doubly impossible!
Pics, or it never happened.
A bit of google searching revealed an obscure button and a setting deep in the bowels of the thing which let you turn them both off and get back to something that looks like a normal email client. But really, what on earth has happened to these guys? Kmail used to be, out of the box, a nice simple email client packaged with a quite decent calendar. You can still get back to that, but you have to make an effort.
Blame your distro packagers? Perhaps the packagers included a default config that was a bit rubbish. Hell, I've known distros to mess with KDE by changing the menu structures.
What version of KMail? What version of KDE?
Srdjan
On Wed, 2009-07-15 at 08:42 +0100, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
The thing now comes with two 'features' which seem designed to destroy usability, and no guide on how to get rid of the things. One is that messages are separated by day and week, with drop down tabs. Why anyone would want this is a mystery. It makes scrolling through your old messages just about impossible. The other is that wherever you move the mouse these crazed popups appear, to obscure whatever you were looking at. This was probably put in in case you should persist in trying to scroll through, and make it doubly impossible!
Possibly the separation by day and week was inspired by MS Outlook which groups recent e-mails by day and older ones by week or month.
Evolution has also implemented some "cleverness" here by changing the format of the displayed date so that e-mails received today show just the time, those received within a week show "Yesterday" or the day of the week and the time and as the message gets older it works up towards the full date/time. The snag is that the person who coded this embedded some date formats that are neither configurable nor honour the user's locale and there is a bug open for it (#205137).
Regards, Steve.
On 15-Jul-09 08:55:25, Steve Fosdick wrote:
On Wed, 2009-07-15 at 08:42 +0100, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
The thing now comes with two 'features' which seem designed to destroy usability, and no guide on how to get rid of the things. One is that messages are separated by day and week, with drop down tabs. Why anyone would want this is a mystery. It makes scrolling through your old messages just about impossible. The other is that wherever you move the mouse these crazed popups appear, to obscure whatever you were looking at. This was probably put in in case you should persist in trying to scroll through, and make it doubly impossible!
Possibly the separation by day and week was inspired by MS Outlook which groups recent e-mails by day and older ones by week or month.
Evolution has also implemented some "cleverness" here by changing the format of the displayed date so that e-mails received today show just the time, those received within a week show "Yesterday" or the day of the week and the time and as the message gets older it works up towards the full date/time. The snag is that the person who coded this embedded some date formats that are neither configurable nor honour the user's locale and there is a bug open for it (#205137).
Regards, Steve.
This is possibly a frivolous comment -- but the above tends to reinforce an growing impression that I have been getting lately, that Linux user interfaces are seeking to encourage MS users by giving them the impression that Linux is as "easy" to use as MS, and there will be nothing unfamiliar about it.
In my view, this is winning converts under false pretences!
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's a Microsoft turkey.
Best wishes to all, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 15-Jul-09 Time: 10:14:14 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
It's not just kmail IMO, despite being on gnome I enjoyed using Amarok up to version 1.4, it was a bit heavy but I liked some of the content and smartplaylist features and it did a reasonable job of helping me search and manage my collection, so I put up with the bloatedness.
Then along comes amarok2 which has the worst user interface I think I have ever encountered http://amarok.kde.org/files/Amarok-2_0_0-Magnatune.png
Is this sort of UI the global standard KDE is moving towards..because it seems hopelessly broken to me.
There are so many different types of UI elements there it gives me a headache just looking at it. Buttons don't look like buttons, the interface is overly busy and wastes so much space around the menubar I wonder what size screen the UI developer was targeting because even with a window size of 1024x786 many things like album names get chopped.
I am not sure what sort of deranged mind decided to put the track position bar at the very top (and make it 2 foot long) and then the currently playing track info at the very bottom when due to the over sized and silly navigation buttons there is acres of wasted space above the bar. Add to this the even slower behavior and I had to hunt down a replacement.
Phew...rant over...it is good to vent sometimes.
Ultimately I am glad this happened because I discovered that ario/mpd pretty much does what I want (although to be fair it is a subset of Amarok in functionality..but most of the lost functions are ones I didn't use anyway) and at least running here is much much more responsive.
Wayne Stallwood wrote:
It's not just kmail IMO, despite being on gnome I enjoyed using Amarok up to version 1.4, it was a bit heavy but I liked some of the content and smartplaylist features and it did a reasonable job of helping me search and manage my collection, so I put up with the bloatedness.
Then along comes amarok2 which has the worst user interface I think I have ever encountered http://amarok.kde.org/files/Amarok-2_0_0-Magnatune.png
Oh I'm glad it's not just me that hates the new amarok2. It might not have been so bad but it appears that all previous versions have been removed from the repositories to force use of amarok2 !
It took me days to work out how to "pin" it at the 1.4 version. I'm so glad I kept a CD of Kubuntu 8.04 to install it from.
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 12:23 PM, Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.co.ukwrote:
It's not just kmail IMO, despite being on gnome I enjoyed using Amarok up to version 1.4, it was a bit heavy but I liked some of the content and smartplaylist features and it did a reasonable job of helping me search and manage my collection, so I put up with the bloatedness.
...*snip*...
I am not sure what sort of deranged mind decided to put the track position bar at the very top (and make it 2 foot long) and then the currently playing track info at the very bottom when due to the over sized and silly navigation buttons there is acres of wasted space above the bar. Add to this the even slower behavior and I had to hunt down a replacement.
Wow, thank you for the pointer to Ario, it's a nice mpd client.
That said, I've just snapped and put amarok 1.4 back on my Jaunty installation and I must say I'm a bit happier. It comes as close to the perfect music player (for me) as anything I've seen, and I've not got an issue with trading some resources for that.
This:
https://edge.launchpad.net/~bogdanb/+archive/amarok14/
May be of interest to the interested Jaunty/Amarok user.
-
nev young -
Peter Alcibiades -
runlevel ten -
Srdjan Todorovic -
Steve Fosdick -
Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk -
Wayne Stallwood