Kmenu and KDE4

[marc]

Billie Walsh said...
> Clay Weber wrote:
> > On Sat December 20 2008 9:34:27 am Billie Walsh wrote:
> >   
> >> It's very obvious that the devs don't pay attention to any user lists.
> >> They should. If they had they wouldn't have been so quick to choose
> >> SUSE's Kickoff. There was a major flap when SUSE released it on the SUSE
> >> users lists. The majority of SUSE users don't use it and hate it.
> >>
> >>     
> > yes, from what I hear from discussions with various devs, they do not usually 
> > follow <foo>-user lists, as they are generally supposed to be for user-to-user 
> > support..
> >
> I don't know. I would think that if I was poring heart and soul into 
> something for others to use I would like to have some sort of indication 
> of their feelings about what I'm doing. If I'm not going in the 
> direction that is most beneficial then I would like to think I would 
> take it that direction. It's kind of a customer service type of thing. 
> If your a retail business and you stop listening to the customers needs 
> and start dictating to the customer, well, there's another store just 
> down the street. I've already seen many, at least threatening to, jump 
> off the KDE ship over this new KDE. There's another interface available.

Devs out there will probably be familiar with agile techniques. There's 
a lot to be said for rolling out a limited edition, and then letting the 
users drive the development for the front end. (The users don't care, 
and should never be made aware of, what is going on behind the scenes.)

I do this in the wild, daily, and find it the path of least resistance. 
In addition, when done, there are no surprises to the users.

The worst you can do is develop a ton of stuff that changes existing 
processes and launch it in one go.

-- 
Cheers,
Marc