In an effort to get to know better the needs of developers are from the Human Interface Guidelines, I solicited several groups of developers to participate in a survey which ran for two weeks in May. The outcome was very good with 52 participants providing their comments and suggestions.

After reviewing the results and compiling them in to a report I think several things are safe to assume about developer's relationship with the HIG:

This and next week will be busier than average. Tonight I met up with pmax (who was in town for biz) with Justin to drink some beers and play some darts at a local bar. Its too bad pmax wont be in town long enough to visit downtown, the cherry blossoms are in full bloom (last night's storm had spared them for yet another week) and its always nice to go site-seeing in the nation's capital.

Recently I went to Ohio to interview young students and their parent about a client's home schooling education system. They were surprised (although I wasn't) how the students were actually using the system (software, materials, teachers, etc.). It just reminded me of how important it is to identify your audience in order to have success. Here are a few things I took away from my trip which could be applied to KDE-Edu (grades K through 6)...

Make it fun

I've been a buzzy little bee for the past few weeks. I would have posted a few days ago, but it ended up turning in to a DOT article.

Although earlier this year I had hoped to get the reports up by the end of January, that they got up by mid-February isn't too bad. The 2005 reports page is here.

Reports were added for: KBruch, KMail Recipients, Koffice Startup, Kopete, KOrganizer, KPrinter.

According to a recent C-Net Police Blotter, email surveillance without any evidence of criminal behavior has been approved. The new law only allows monitoring of email headers (hence justifies as 'constitutional'), but the fact that they can freely monitor and log email traffic is alarming.

Friday is my last day at .gov where I will be moving on the bigger and better things. For the past 14 months Ive been through three natural disasters (Indian Ocean tsunami, Katrina/Rita hurricanes, Pakistani/Indian earthquake), watched a few funerals on TV (Pope John Paul II, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King) and scandal galore (too many to list).

I can't say I'll miss the job very much, but I will miss my coworkers. They were really the ones who made the job interesting, and while being a consultant I wont get that same 'Office' atmosphere.

sorry for the caps, but i *am* yelling :)

this weekend justin and i went home and watched (and later celebrated) the steelers play in the super bowl.

for those of you who are not familiar with the super bowl, it is the championship game for american football (you know that weird game that is nothing like soccer). for those of you who are not familiar with me or the steelers, you should know that i am from pittsburgh and so are they ;)

Since I havn't posted in a while, a quick QOTD:

kawakokappa (10:55:29 AM): could you imagine reproducing a series of steps with half of them missing?

seele varcuzzo (10:56:15 AM): no, and youre going to make me core dump if you make me

Oh hell.. why not. Maybe if I say I'm going to do something on public forum, I'll actually get it done :)

Of course, I shouldn't give myself the entire year to do some of these things, so maybe I should set an expiration on each item.

Put up the KDE Usability Project tests and reports I gathered in December