Re: [Usability] Familiarity, Accessibility, and Survival of the Fittest

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 01:06:38PM -0500, Liam Quin wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 11:41:42AM -0600, Gregory Merchan wrote:
> > Perhaps the best fit for GNOME is to be like these other
> > environments, but more capable, more accessible, much faster,
> > and much better looking.
> 
> <sarcasm>
> Of course.  Free Software projects should never try to innovate.
> </sarcasm>

Sarcasm acknowledged, but I never intended that. The 'more capable'
exception is the most important place for innovation to occur. I still
haven't found a good gui editor for structured text; though the
conglomerate program ( http://www.conglomerate.org ) seems nice,
it also seems to not be developed any more.


> If you don't like instant-apply dialogue boxes, . . .

I would prefer instant-apply personally.

<snip>
> 
> Freehand has an "Inspector" pallette that's instant apply on Windows as
> well as Mac (and Sun for that matter, although they stopped shipping the
> Sun version years ago).  You can use tab to move from control to control
> without an apply, but pressing Enter will always make a change; this
> saves power users a lot of time on complex drawings.

I found a two screenshots of what this looks like on Windows and it looks
like what I would expect an instant-apply interface to look like. (The
shots are part of a bug report about a focus problem.)

  http://www.freehandsource.com/_frames/_misc/_bugs/fh9/bug_008.html


> Where it's even more important to give users control over when things
> happen -- e.g. in a 3d rendering package like Bryce, where a change could
> take _days_ to render, the buttons are, of course, not instant :-)
> 
> I don't thibnk anyone is suggesting making all dialogues instant.

I hope no one is. The file opening dialog would be most confusing
if it were somehow instant-apply; it would probably result in many
files opening unnecessarily during navigation. (On the other hand, such
a dialog should seem pointless if the file manager is good enough.)

I do object to calling such things dialogs, as can be noted elsewhere.


An alternative not mentioned on the list thusfar is to provide a menubar
for these instant-apply interfaces. It could be a very simple menubar
with just three menus:
 a first menu (appropriately named) to provide commands like those found
   on a File menu. These I imagine would be Save, Revert, and Close.
 an Edit menu to provide apparent access to Undo, Cut, Copy, and Paste.
   There is otherwise only a right-click menu or keyboard shortcuts to those
   commands and both those methods are 'hidden'.
 a Help menu for the obvious purpose.

This might seem odd, but all the parts are familiar and accessible.

> Liam  (Ankh on irc.gnome.wotsit)
> 
> -- 
> Liam Quin - XML Core staff contact, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
> Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
> Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
> Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001


Cheers,
Gregory Merchan