i have been defeated, but victory shall be mine!

every so often i get requested to use the shift key once in a while. i have remain resistant to the notion of such a shift in my typing behaviour. and so it came to pass that jaroslaw staniek rose to the occasion and has used software to vanquish my typographical atrocities. you can see the results, in all it's proper capitalization wonders, here. he even lovingly called it the "deaaronify service". and now you can all just stop bugging me about it ;)

the kde database app, kexi, is still my favourite bit of staniek creativity though =)

and speaking of creativity, kurt asks if our marketing sucks so bad that people don't stand a chance of discovering our wonderous tools such as kbardcode, the label maker extraordinaire. i think the hard answer is: yes, yes it does suck that much.

we've done an amazing job of improving how we communicate about and promote kde over the last few years. additional improvements such as intentional branding and coordinating web presences are on the way.

unfortunately this a is a labour intensive process that really draws on one's creativity and patience, which is why it takes so long to notice improvements as they get made and why our promo people need to take breaks so often. (hats off to those folks, btw..) and because it's such a journey to deal with just the central kde concept alone, it's doubtful we can realistically do much for the individual applications. but perhaps we can optimize the algorithm. (to speak like a software developer.)

one approach would be parallelize things. if we could bundle up in a HOWTO with some reusable components a "marketing your application" then each project could replicate and improve upon our own successes. this would likely create a network effect where each addition would raise the tide for all kde applications.

what might such a thing include? templates for websites, release announcements and articles; a small app or script that would submit the app to various online directories; a listing of news feeds such as kde://radio where they could spread the word; a list of best practices and things to consider (e.g. getting a good logo that fits in with others; picking name that fits in with our arising new schemes) etc.. this bundle of information could be maintained by one person or a small groups of persons and used by hundreds.

then we wouldn't have to try and market every app (giving them fish), we could enable each application to market itself effectively (teaching them to fish and even giving them fishing rods)

we also ought to think about exposing application postings on kde-apps.org better so when someone says, "i'd like to print some labels" they type "print label" into the applications menu and it would show that while they don't have any such apps installed there is such an app (kbarcode) available because that's exactly what appsy says right now if you do that search.

i just talked with asiraj of kbfx about this on irc and we both agree this only makes sense for the application search in the menu in kde4, and easily done if the search supports plugins. yay. =)