More than 2 and a half years ago a historical meeting took place in Berlin –
APPEAL. From the Dot story:
“The scope was broad and incuded
artwork, human interface guidelines, Tenor (a contextual linkage engine),
alterntives to traditional file managers and groupware applications.”
Reading back, there is a striking similarity with core concepts of KDE4. Most of
those items are reality in KDE 4.0. Others are close to done and will surface
wthin the next releases.
being a student), this atmosphere of doing something big became more evident.
There, I worked with Jan and Ellen (Relevantive & OpenUsability) on a usability review of Guidance. To me, this showed
the great potential and how to merge the processes around software development
ad usability engineering and get something really nice out of it. I also remember a presentation given by three artists, the Oxygen team. Ken, Nuno and David
presented their first bits of work to the community. They discussed concepts
behind the Oxygen icon set (it was still merely an icon set, back then) and even
showed a first, very early pre-alpha version of some icons. At the same aKademy, we started setting up the Marketing Working Group, with its
primary mission coherent messaging around KDE, based on Guerilla Marketing and
scientific strategical analyses. For me, this was the start of the KDE 4 vision. Tomorrow we will flip the switch to make
this vision reality. And next week we’ll
present it to the world.