[Scribus] Usability

[Paul Tansom]

On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 18:02:43 +0200
Craig Bradney <cbradney at zip.com.au> wrote:
> On Tuesday 12 October 2004 17:47, Paul Tansom wrote:
> > On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 18:23:53 +0300
> > "Riku Leino (Tsoots)" <foom at welho.com> wrote:
> > > Manfred Jung wrote:
<snip>
> > > In my opinion it would be more important to match the "standard"
> > > of the platform where the application is run rather than the
> > > program group where it belongs. In Scribus' case even it's not a
> > > pure KDE application it uses QT and is best run under KDE and KDE
> > > users finds the look familiar. That's where I think we should take
> > > the standard for desigining the look, layout and behaviour.
> >
> > A very quick plea having read the above - please don't tie the
> > application in too closely to KDE. I have nothing against it in
> > terms of considering it bad or anything, I just don't like it for my
> > own usage. I personally prefer Gnome of the two big names, but even
> > that I haven't used for a long while (my preferences and biases are
> > largely based on usage back in 2000 I guess, but I have used both on
> > machines much more recently so I'm not completely outdated!).
> > However, if there starts to get a heavy requirement in KDE (or Gnome
> > for that matter) libraries then that will likely cause me problems
> > (in terms of do I install the libraries or try to find an
> > alternative).
> >
> > I don't know whether there are that many like myself, but I tend to
> > ignore software that is too closely linked in with one specific
> > desktop environment unless it is pretty light weight. As an example,
> > I have considered trying out Evolution for mail, but on my system
> > (which does everything I need quite nicely) I would have to install
> > 53 extra packages and use another 82.1MB of disk space just to get a
> > different email client (admittedly fairly fully featured). This
> > comes down to the use of Gnome libraries, etc..
> >
> > Just to to be sure - I am not having a rant against any desktop
> > environment here (I use XFCE myself which is definitely growing
> > itself!), just expressing the hope that Scribus doesn't become too
> > dependent on large chunks of one or other of them being installed.
> > Ideally I guess there would be a mutually defined layer between any
> > of the desktop environments and the application which allowed you to
> > plug into whichever you happen to use - but that would likely be a
> > massive undertaking, and technically quite an interesting challenge,
> > not to mention a certain extra overhead!
> >
> > Anyhoo, it is definitely a nice application, and I am looking
> > forward to doing some decent scale DTP with it - can anyone let me
> > have an extra 48 hours each day? :-)
> 
> The simple answer is, at this point in time we firmly rest in the Qt
> line, and not in KDE, nor Gnome or any other system. We do have
> certain plans to put in place build time capability to use more of the
> KDE functions like kioslaves in the 1.3 dev series. We do however
> insist on keeping a level of cross DE capability as we certainly do
> not wish to alienate DEs, and other platforms like Mac OSX.

I've no objection to allowing integration of features, it's the heavy
requirement on libraries and extra packages to install that I'd rather
avoid. I guess if an app is going to fully integrate into something then
you should expect it, but it does rather lead towards the question "Do
you use Windows, Mac, KDE, Gnome or something else?" which personally I
think should be avoided as it fragments Linux - but at least you can
install the libraries and use the app if you want to :-)

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/