| > Well, I won't deny that there's some truth in what you said, but first a couple of comments about the examples. Well, your comments are on the screenshots, not on the applications. Try to use these applications for a while "to get the job done", you will get what I meant. I have been a KDE user for years, I even contributed some patches back then. I still prefer Qt to GTK. But I whenever I can I use GNOME applications instead of KDE (with the exception of K3B). I think the main problem can be traced back to when you say > [In Skanlite/Simple Scan] Scan source, scan mode and scan resolution are important properties when scanning and it's very useful to have direct access to them. Simple Scan (the GTK app) presents you two presets (Text and Image) and just guesses the rest of the details for you. And you know what? It gets them right 99% of the times. When it doesn't you can access the usual Preferences pane and modify whatever you want. As somebody else commented in this thread, the KDE world refuses to have "reasonable" defaults in place, starting from the default theme to the good engineering practice of trying to guess as much as possible before asking questions. PS: Transmissions was born in 2005 as a neat Cocoa application, GTK for Linux has been added soon after in version 0.6 (2006) and the Qt interface was started only in version 1.6 (2009). This is why it looks so like nice. |
From what I can see, Simple Scan's "magic" is using a default DPI for Text (150 dpi) with grayscale, and another for Photos (300 dpi) and color. What if I want a light photo for the web, or a photo in grayscale? I think these aren't unreasonable examples at all. I suppose I'll have to use the counterintuitive Text for both examples, but now my photo looks awful on print and it's overkill (and monochrome) for the web! And if I have to go to Preferences for such common examples then it would be better to offer them right there in the main screen. Presets are good, guessing is good if you make the options easily available to tweak them. Simplistic presets and hidden options are not good IMHO.
You see, there's simple and there's simplistic. I already agreed that some options in KDE are overkill and should be hidden by default, but some of them are really useful. For example, why can't I preview a large photo while navigating visually the rest in Showell? It's something I usually do with my photos. With Digikam I just press a button and have that, I haven't found it possible in Shotwell, it's either one large photo at a time or many little photos.