Re: Popup Menus [Commit (HEAD): Stock icons for the positioned object popup menu (gtk).]

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:

> Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 14:56:11 +0100
> From: Reinout van Schouwen <reinout@gmail.com>
> To: abiword-dev@abisource.com
> Subject: Re: Popup Menus [Commit (HEAD): Stock icons for the positioned
> object popup menu (gtk).]
>
>
> Tomas,
>
> On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 08:10:32 +0000, Tomas Frydrych
> <tomasfrydrych@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > There is a certain tendency in GNOME to hide things from the user, to
> > provide preferences without appropriate UI, and to make it difficult for
> > the user to do things in a way that is different from what the usability
> > people think is the right way.

The usability listen to feedback and try to please most of the people most
of the time but they cannot please everyone. Unfortunately with Gnome 2
the group most alienated are the techies and the tweakers. To the
average user usability is like special effects, if they notice you
then you have probably done it wrong.

> That is an unfair characterization. You could also argue that
> non-GNOME desktops have a tendency to expose things to the user that
> are implementation details, or that are historically grown piles of
> crud that haven't been thought through in context of common use cases.
> The "preferences without appropriate UI" are there for people who have
> grown used to certain (UNIX-)ways of doing things, like
> middle-click-paste, that wouldn't make sense to unexperienced users.
> People are putting UIs on top of those prefs, though: see
> gtweakui.sf.net for instance.

We get where you are coming from though. There is a need to balance
simple good defaults with some flexibility and the option to changes some
of those defaults.

> Lastly, the "usability people" (I will
> count myself as one) have far less influence on the GNOME development
> process as they would like (or you seem to think), because they often
> aren't the ones writing the code.

I continue to be amazed and impressed at how the HIG helps restore some of
small amount of the balance of power backto users. (If developers didn't
want feedback or care what other people thought they wouldn't release
their code at all.) It gives users a resonably defined standard that they
can ask developers to follow for a more consistant desktop.

Developers still have the power and discretion to do things differently.
The HIG means that they are less likely to do things differently unless
they are confident that it really is better (not just different) and worht
the procie of breaking consistency.

> > I am not keen to have that
> > 'users do not know what is good for them' attitude imported into AW
> > design, UI or otherwise.
>
> Sure, but this is definately not the attitude the GNOME project has.
> That attitude is more like "It should Just Workˇ.

I heard the SourceGear gusy repeat that slogan here over and over long
before I saw it on the Gnome lists :)

Thomas I look forward to you helping us keep the balance between
streamlined simplicity and powerful flexibility.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

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Received on Wed Feb 23 16:59:23 2005