aKademy 2008 - Wrap Up
Celeste Lyn Paul, Ellen Reitmayr and Peter Sikking from the OpenUsability team attended this year's developer summit of the K Desktop Environment that took place from August 9 to 14 in Mechelen, Belgium.
During the conference program, Peter Sikking introduced the KDE community to his work regarding common printing dialogs for all Linux desktops. ‘Printing that just works’ is the vision of these activities in the scope of the OpenPrinting project, run by the Linux Foundation. After a brief summary of the major aspects that influenced Peter's design decisions, he presented first mockups of the "next generation printing dialogs". Celeste Lyn Paul presented the past, current state and future of the KDE Usability Project, an initiative that is strongly related to OpenUsability. She described the work that has been done in the past years, and at the same time pointed out that the progress of the KDE usability initiative is limited. She discussed organizational-level changes such as changing from the application to a global perspective which will hopefully better serve KDE4. During the "Hack Marathon", Celeste Lyn Paul and Ellen Reitmayr organised a Human Computer Interaction day including various workshops to educate the KDE developers with regard to usability and design practices. The day started with an introduction to the KDE user research profiles which are supposed to help KDE developers to define their project goals. In a second session, six usability and design methods for developers were described. Subsequently, Aaron Seigo introduced the interaction concepts of the Plasma desktop for KDE4, and Thomas Pfeiffer, one of our Season of Usability interns, explained the process of documenting common interaction patterns for the KDE4 desktop. The HCI day was finished with an open Q&A session where developers could show their applications or dialogs and ask for usability improvements.
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