About Help, Wikis and Firefox Qt

Busy days, like really busy....

First things first.
KHelpCenter looks less awkward:

It now uses the help-browser icon instead of the old crystal one. The style templates are fixed, glossary now also comes with KDE 4 style and the old introduction stuff got removed completely.
Kicker applets stuff was removed in favor of Plasma (which also got an icon ;-). In general all icons are now fixed (well, some quirks with the main items are still remaining).
KCModules (i.e. the thingies for System Settings and KInfoCenter) are added to their categories.

I also came to think about improving the general experience. In my opinion the interface should be redesigned making the search a central part (considering nepomuk/strigi usage gets implemented), there is really no way I would want to browse docs manually in the year 2008 ;-). Also using Phonon and KHTML/QWebKit a much greater use of online content should be considered (e.g. screencasts).

About the written online content we also had a discussion today. Essentially a lot of the documentation is outdated, no wonder thinking of the amount of applications and features, so really no one's fault here, still we should improve the situtation. Current proposal: using a wiki for ongoing documentation, then take snapshots for proof reading by the responsible developers and then let translators do their magic. Eventually even do the translation in the wiki? I certainly think with this approach we should only ship a very basic amount of documentation with KDE and access the remaining parts online.
I think Windows' help does it quite the same way in that it includes the MS support database, well at least I think it does.

If anyone wants to get loads of karma, he/she may step up and start work on KHelpCenter, I really think there is great potential for this application.

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Another really cool thing: work on a new wiki.kde.org started (whichmakes me quite happy since the current one was always kind of not-working when I needed something). The best thing about it is that it got OpenId (alsa known as 'I-only-need-one-login') support, which goes very well with the OpenID support in Amarok's web infrastructure.
The thing is: we need you! you, dear reader :)
Content from wiki.kde.org needs to be reviewed and selected for migration or dumping (later on moving and updating seems to be on the todo).

So, if you have some time and want to help KDE get a new shiny wiki -> join #kde on irc.freenode.net and poke Jucato

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Meanwhile I got firefox-qt to work (at least until you press any buttons...), head over to Jonathan's blog for more information.

One note about the used archive though: this archive is meant for very expermiental packages (Intrepid users will find mozilla-plugin-plasma for example). By experimental I don't only mean the software itself but also the packages, e.g. there is no guarantee that firefox-qt will be named firefox-qt once it is in the offical archives.
Therefore I suggest to be very careful which packages get installed from this archive, I would even go so far that you should remove it once you installed the desired software and check for updates yourself.

Sunday, August 17, 2008