Subject: Re: Word 2000 copies Paul :-)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Mon Aug 20 2001 - 00:59:41 CDT
At 12:05 PM 8/20/01 +1000, Martin Sevior wrote:
> Just to let you know, Word 2000 has copied many elements for your
>MSDI behaviour :-) New documents get their own toolbars and frames. These
>are free to move anywhere on the screen just like Abi. Also MS finally
>managed to work out how to do on-demand scrolling with Word 2000. Word
>2000 scrolls imediately the scroll bar moves also just like Abi.
Thanks, Martin! You just made my evening.
While it's flattering to think that they directly copied us, I'm not sure
it's historically accurate. :-) The browser precedent is so strong, that a
case could be made that the two discoveries were independently made.
I know that the last version of Word I saw (prior to today's screen shots)
was Word 97. I wonder what the first version of AbiWord they saw was?
Unless you're friends with a DOJ lawyer, we may never know. ;-)
>"Close" command closes the currently open document except for the very
>last document. Upon closing the very last document the application stays
>up and the drawing area goes grey.
>
>We could argue about whether this is a feature or a bug. Given the
>behaviour of how other documents behave when closed this is inconsistant.
>However many, many users only ever deal with one document at a time.
>Having close cause the screen to go grey makes sense to people who work
>like this.
Yep. If it works that way, I've no doubt people will get used to it. It's
also clear that people who *are* used to that behavior will be initially
surprised that we don't work that way, too. [1]
What's not clear to me is whether those same people won't get used to *and
prefer* our way of working once they get used to our behavior. I want to be
sure that, over time, the way we work is streamlined for the following two
endpoints:
- people with no preconceptions using us for the first time,
- people who are using us for the 1000th day in a row.
If my intuition is right, and the UI we currently have makes both of those
kinds of people happy, then I'm willing to take some well-deserved heat from
folks in the middle of the user spectrum whose intuitions have been polluted
by too long in the MDI world.
And if I'm wrong, we'll know when over 50% of our second million users vote
an RFE like this to the top of Bugzilla. :-)
Paul
[1] Assuming, of course, that they're still more used to Word as a
precedent than IE or NSCP. These days, I'd think that for more and more
people, it'd be the other way around.
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