Ring-KDE 3.0 Released To Use The GNU's Distributed Communication Platform

[cybertraveler]

... but that's a dark theme that I found quite ugly...

Yeah, I thought that was an ugly theme too. I prefer the one you linked.

[Vistaus]

Looks fine. Relax. That person was just using crappy settings.

Looks a lot better, but still room for improvement.

[andyprough]

This screenshot is very different to the first one you linked.

I'm 99% sure that the first screenshot you linked is not Ring-KDE. The first screenshot you linked looks relatively well designed. The quoted screenshot above is Ring-KDE, but with a different skin/theme to the one Michael linked. The quoted screenshot above has many of the issues originally pointed out by ElectricPrism and some new ones.

You are probably correct. The first is one I grabbed online. The one above is an actual screenshot after installing the 3.0.0 appimage on my Tumbleweed system. I installed it without changing any defaults. Not sure how the screenshots that Michael showed were obtained, but that's a dark theme that I found quite ugly. I think the screenshot I took is clean and in keeping with typical KDE applications.

[cybertraveler]

Here's the dial screen from the latest version on my Tumbleweed setup. Seems fairly benignly KDE-ish.

This screenshot is very different to the first one you linked.

I'm 99% sure that the first screenshot you linked is not Ring-KDE. The first screenshot you linked looks relatively well designed. The quoted screenshot above is Ring-KDE, but with a different skin/theme to the one Michael linked. The quoted screenshot above has many of the issues originally pointed out by ElectricPrism and some new ones.

I think it's great that people are working on a KDE Ring client, but ElectricPrism is right: it doesn't look good. There are shared standards of design, aesthetics and ergonomics (especially) just as there are shared 'best practice' standards of coding. This program is not following those shared standards of design, aesthetics and ergonomics.

I think it would be a big improvement if they simply added some spacing outside and inside every widget. It would also be improved if they improved the alignment of many widgets (e.g. the hamburger menu button in the bottom left of your screenshot is not horizontally centred within its container... and it lacks external spacing beneath it). Furthermore, hamburger menus are typically positioned at the top of applications not the bottom: things like this are important. Developers shouldn't break user expectations. Users should be able to intuitively use applications. Their intuition is formed based on their existing experience of using other applications that all follow conventions. Everytime a user is surprised by the behaviour of an application or they have to search around for something on the UI because it's not where they expected, their frustration is increased, their time is wasted and the overall user experience is reduced.

[khnazile]

Is it possible to link account to another device now? That feature didn't work for me in previous versions.

[andyprough]

That screenshot you provided doesn't look like a screenshot of Ring-KDE. Not even the title bar text matches the screenshot provided by Michael. I think that might be a screenshot of an older version of the official Ring.cx desktop software.

Here's the dial screen from the latest version on my Tumbleweed setup. Seems fairly benignly KDE-ish.

Are all KDE apps this ugly?

I personally haven't seen an uglier KDE app. That's a whole new level.

EDIT: Statement still valid about andyprough's screenshot below my comment.

[linuxgeex]

I used twinkle for years as a chat / voip client on Linux. The one thing Ring has going for it is the DHT-based (Kademlia) de-centralized peer-to-peer networking. The big thing against Ring is that it's GNOME. If you want a VOIP client that doesn't let you configure 95% of VOIP features but uses literally 100x the resources of a fully-featured VOIP client, Ring is the product you have been dreaming about. Oh... and the obscene memory use - that's not so it can run faster. It's so it can run radically slower along with that greatly reduced feature set. GNOME - proving the addage that as computers get faster and have more resources, programs will expand and slow down to waste those resources. But the chat is good. Can't wait for a re-implementation to show up that runs in under 1GB after exchanging a dozen messages and placing 3 2-minute phonecalls.

[cybertraveler]

Looks fine. Relax. That person was just using crappy settings.

That screenshot you provided doesn't look like a screenshot of Ring-KDE. Not even the title bar text matches the screenshot provided by Michael. I think that might be a screenshot of an older version of the official Ring.cx desktop software.

[boxie]

Looks fine. Relax. That person was just using crappy settings.

Yeah, that interface still needs work - I don't think it does a good job of making a complex system simple to use yet. I hope the VDG are asked to get involved!