[Usability] Re: Proposed AbiWord preferences dialog mockup

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, David Adam Bordoley wrote:

> >> 4. Why would you disable tooltips?
> >
> > I think some people find them annoying (advanced users maybe).
> > MS Word and The Gimp have this option too.
>
> Yeah still seems like one of those lets get it right issues. In nautilus for
> example toolbar tooltips appear in the statusbar which i really like.

I would like to have both a tooltip and a status bar message.  Visio does
something along these lines but I dont have Visio here so I cannot
describe the exact circumstances correctly.

Using the status bar (possibly on mouseover of an element, not sure tho')
is nice because tooltips are slow and you could not make tooltips faster
without it being incredibly annoying.

> WEll people are pretty notorious for accidentally not saving documents. [1]
> I really fail to see how autosaving every 5 minutes can really hurt
> performance that much.

Plugin.  Proof.  Possibly Future Default.

This has been discussed extensively on the usability list before at least
once which is why I said it would work with sticky notes.  Even if it did
work adequately Abiword is not an appropriate place to test this theory.
I am not really the one you need to convince, mostly I am just an
overprotective Abiword user (who doesn't need the headache of answering a
million how do I save questions).

Should not be hard to remove the save button (already customisable
menus) and change autosave to defualt to on.
If you added a plugin to allow/streamline this feature I am sure
some of our users would appreciate it.

Sincerely

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