KludgeHack

Freelance Samurai says 1 November 2007 @ 17:55

I needed this about a year ago.

Sound has always been the bastard child of the user interaction dept. in any OS, really.
Even Apple it all it’s user interface elegance avoids the problem by making it as minimalistic as common sense allows it.

I’m developing the sounds for the upcoming KDE4, and trying to research for it I found myself marooned in the land of no real information. then I decided to make the plunge, fire up a gazzilion different VM’s and get the most important OS’s out there working (windows, linux’es) and my ibook got a taste of OS9 (which I think was a first for him)… everything I wasn’t able to test I’d search the web for the wav files…it doesn’t give you the real feel of the thing (because A LOT of the process of creating a coherent sound theme relies on the animations played along with it) and I was really shocked to see how there was virtually no effort put into it. Easy way outs like Apple’s were (is?) really the way to go, wile previous versions of KDE ended up with so many sounds (and some of them I cringe with the mere thought of how they sounded when it came to user reaction) that it was just a trigger for people to turn everything off after an install.