Stuart Jarvis

It has been really encouraging to see how much of the rebranding is sticking already – the better known news sites seem to be generally reporting the first beta of KDE Software Compilation 4.4 rather than KDE 4.4, but… well you knew there would be a “but”, right?

Well here it is: If you used to use “KDE” don’t just replace it with “KDE SC”

At least, not always… I’ve noticed a few people – and even your KDE Promo team is not immune from this – apparently being a little confused about what terms to use. People are trying to be good and not use “KDE” alone but in some instances this leads to a little overuse of KDE SC when that’s not really what is meant.

I just had a quick scan through Planet KDE for examples and I’m going to pick on Björn’s excellent post about icon usability (if you didn’t already, please complete the test). Not because it’s bad – or necessarily even wrong at all – but because I think it’s a nice example of subtlety in thinking carefully about what we mean. In that post, he says:

We want KDE SC to be usefull for everyone in the world. So, do our icons and our terms work for everyone in the world?

So, what’s wrong with that? Not necessarily anything. The question is, does he really mean we want only the SC to be useful for everyone in the world? We’ll never do a usability survey for Amarok icons? So perhaps the better term would be “KDE software” rather than “KDE SC”.

Björn’s post is a case in point because the error (if any) is very small and subtle, but there are a few other examples I’ve seen that do appear to show more confusion. I won’t pick on anyone here, but here are a few examples of sentences using old and new terminologies to show that we don’t want to just replace “KDE” with “KDE SC”:

Old: “I use KDE”
New: “I use KDE software” or “I use KDE SC (4.4)” or “I use KDE Plasma Desktop (4.4)”

Use whichever one you really mean.

Old: “KDE is great – just look at how cool Digikam is”
New: “KDE software is great – just look at how cool digiKam is” or “KDE (community) is great – they made digiKam”

Just think – are you talking about the community or the software?

Old: “KDE is the best, it has Kontact, cool widgets and desktop effects”
New: “KDE software is the best – for example Kontact, the Plasma Desktop widgets and desktop effects” or “Plasma Desktop is the best – you have all those cool widgets and desktop effects” or “KDE Software Compilation is the best – it comes with all the Plasma Desktop widgets and effects and great apps like Kontact”

Old: “I want to make an app, should I use KDE or Gnome or plain Qt?”
New: “I want to make an app, should I use the KDE Platform, or Gnome or plain Qt?”

Old: “KDE 4 sucks and I’m switching to Gnome until there’s a KDE 4 K3B”
New: “KDE SC 4 sucks, I can’t even get a KDE Platform 4 version of K3B to fit in with it, Gnome forever” or “KDE Platform 4 sucks, no K3B yet, Vista for me” or “Plasma Desktop 4 sucks, there isn’t even a complementary version of K3B. I’m going back to CDE.”

See, you can even use the right terms when trolling

Old: “Nepomuk is one of the most exciting developments in KDE 4″
New ” Nepomuk is one of the most exciting parts of the KDE Platform 4″ or “Nepomuk is one of the most interesing things in KDE SC 4″

Old: “Amarok is an awesome KDE app”
New: “Amarok is an awesome KDE app”

Some things change, but some things stay the same

So, this is really an internal thing – perhaps you post to the Planet or write about KDE elsewhere. If so, and you support our efforts at clarifying our branding, please try and think about what it is you mean and use the right terms. If we simply replace “KDE” with “KDE SC” then we won’t have achieved anything. We don’t want KDE SC used everywhere, if we did we’d have given it a catchier name

There is, as always, more to do. Nathan Ogden has done some really great work (with assistance from others on KDE-Promo) putting together a guide for distros on how to use our brands in their communication. We need to get the word on that out to our distro contacts (something I should be helping with – perhaps you can help?) so that it’s as easy as possible for us all to work together and present things in a consistent way.

Any other examples? Queries about the above? “I hate the rebranding” rants? Please post below

Tags: background, branding

Long promised, we finally got around to setting up a poll (down on the right hand side) to guide us in choosing a label(s) to recommend to third party application developers who would like to associate their applications with either the KDE Community or KDE Platform.

So go to KDE Apps, vote and help us choose.

Tags: branding, poll

How do we get more people interested in KDE software? We can talk about it being Free (and free), point out that it does everything that the proprietary competition can do (if that’s true) but there is always a cost in changing software: you have to learn new stuff. Therefore our biggest openings are when the alternatives suck and so people are looking for change or when our stuff just leaves the competition for dead. The latter one is about the wow factor – something in our software that makes the casual observer sit up and take notice and think “I want that”.

The wow factor could be visual, but it needn’t be. Here are a few things that have prompted people who see me using KDE software to ask what the application is:

• KWin – the desktop effects are really pretty slick now (this one works best on people who don’t use Macs)
• Konqueror shortcuts – I use the gg shortcut for Google and have set up ‘go’ as the shortcut for Google I’m Feeling lucky (it’s shorter and, to me, more intuitive than ggl). Several people seeing me use ‘go bbc news’ (or whatever) have been pretty much dumbfounded – “you mean you can just tell it where to go without knowing the address?”
• Kopete – “You’ve got all your chat accounts in one app?”
• Amarok – the Wikipedia integration, mainly
• Okular – people love that presentation progress indicator
• KRandR – people are suprised I can just plug a projector in and activate it with a couple of clicks
• Digikam – it’s just so cool all round, but the Facebook upload plugin is a particular winner
• KRunner – it looks fairly funky and people are impressed by the speed of launching applications (most menu launchers suck)
• Marble – fairly cool anyway, but fire up the OpenStreetMap view and people want it
• Kile – simple things like code completion and syntax highlighting impress people trying to use Notepad for LaTeX
• Gwenview – it’s just so shiny, particularly in full-screen mode

Several items in that list surprise me a little, because they’re things I take for granted (Konqueror’s web shortcuts for example) and I’m sure several of them would leave a lot of people cold. So which can we push when promoting KDE software, which can we demonstrate at events and what others can we add to the list?

I’ve started a page to track these on the wiki, so please add your own or comment below.

Tags: help needed, promotion, wow factor

I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours – well, actually, I’ll show you mine anyway

Thomas Hannigan suggested on kde-promo the rather good idea of making a flickr group to showcase some of the ways you can build your own ideal workspace using KDE’s Plasma Desktop. This can act as a store of various ways people have built working environments different to the ones you normally see (that could be handy for us in our own promotional activities) and also, being on flickr, can help expose KDE software to an audience that might not be aware of us.

So, if you’ve done something a bit different with your workspace, please upload the picture to the group. You can be super helpful by applying a Creative Commons license to it so that we can re-use it easily any time should we want to do so. CC-by-sa or something even more permissive would be ideal.

Update

I just noticed on the thread relating to this on kde-promo: there is also a screenshot thread on the KDE Forums which is a great additional (or alternative if you don’t have a flickr account) place to post your screenshot.

Tags: help needed, Plasma Desktop, promotion, screenshots

It’s been one of those busy weeks that come up from time to time, both on the work front and a few personal things to deal with (both have been hard work, but good as possible results all round). The net result is that I’ve felt like I haven’t really had the time for KDE stuff, though I’ve found a few minutes here and then to review the odd Dot article. Oh, and I did get around to doing a new WordPress install (having slightly borked the first one trying to shoehorn it in to the old site structure and design, to the extend that a routine update I tried on another server broke a lot of stuff). I clearly don’t have time to maintain anything more than a blog from the old site structure I inherited, so I’ve abandoned that idea. Hopefully the redirects will work ok and I haven’t just spammed the Planet (I tried not to and nothing bad seems to have happened so far – apologies if I have though).

Anyway, plenty of other people have been very busy on the promotion front. Justin and co have been continuing to do great work with Camp KDE and the numbers of attendees there are rising nicely. Jos and others have continued to work on things in the community wiki which is starting to get to be a really useful resource.

Excitingly, there seem to be several new people appearing on the kde-promo mailing list (although it’s possible that they’re old hands and they just haven’t been around for a while). Long-time KDE blogger Liquidat (aka Roland Walters) has an article in progress for the Dot, which is pretty awesome.

Most encouraging of all was the response to the Krita appeal for funding. I didn’t have any doubt they’d reach their target, given the amount to the raised and the quality of the proposal, but I was surprised at the speed with which the target has been reached. Perhaps an approach to consider for other application teams in the future, though it’s probably something that needs to be not done too often.

After a busy Monday, I’ll hopefully be a bit more active again. Getting a poll together to choose a text for third party developers to show their application’s affiliation with KDE is top of my hit list and I also have a mostly done Dot article that should hopefully be appearing towards the end of the week.

Busy times

Tags: busy, Camp KDE