Re: Preferences [Was: a whole lot of other things, too]

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 29Apr2002 05:22PM (+0200), textshell wrote:
> On Monday 29 April 2002 02:16, you wrote:
> > Mouse shouldn't be difficult to prevent from having wrong values. We
> > just need to make sure we don't let the user set mouse speeds to things
> > that would be crazy on their system. We should know the DPI and stuff,
> > right? I suspect we can do a pretty good job at limiting the slider to
> > reasonable values. Maybe that's naive and unrealistic with X, I dunno.
> > Jonathan would know better.
> >
> See here IS the problem! How should you developer know better what mouse 
> speed is apropriate for my system than me. Just some points having a special 
> mouse that ist much slower/faster (say x-highres mouse or something), having 
> to get some work done on a sunday with a way to broken mouse. etc. pp.
> 
> Please don't try to outsmart the users, you CAN'T know all the situation 
> beforehand, so built tools not policy (as some old open source ppl say).

Since the UI is a slider, the developers have to pick a range of
possible values. So there's no way you are going to avoid being
limited in this way. What Seth is suggesting is to try harder to make
the range reasonable. In some cases, this may make the range narrower,
in other cases wider.


> For you pleasure some real life example, something with my mouse at the 
> computer is broken: it sometimes just hangs, but with LINUX i can dwell down 
> into the innerworkings of the system(this time the kernel) and find a way the 
> reset the stupid device. This way a can get my work done (TM). But only using 
> a pretty absurd and "dangerous" option (requieres root access and chvt 1)
> 
> 
> to wrap this up: The user is the user, he knows what he wants, he gets what 
> he wants and everybody who thinks he is to stupid should throw away his root 
> password and go back to kindergarden!

I don't think most people have this attitude towards computers. I know
a _lot_ about how my computer works, but I don't want to have to use
that knowledge for every little thing. I want it to Just Work(tm) by
default. It's nice to have a back door open to tweaking in case this
doesn't work, but this shouldn't get in the way of making a nice
experience for 99% of users.

> 
> PS: Sorry for getting a bit emotional, but Computer are TOOLS, we should not 
> make them to fight the users.
> 

Nor should we require the users to be expert toolsmiths to be able to
use them. Users should only have to know as much as the driver of a
car, not as much as the mechanic.

 - Maciej