Re: new file selector dialog?

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Fri, 2002-03-08 at 16:48, David Moles wrote:
> 
> And I don't think it *should* be a *standard* feature just because *you*
> need it for *your* situation. I'm not seeing the need, so I don't think
> it should be a standard; you *are* seeing the need, so you do. We need
> to determine whose situation is more typical.

Or, simply, which idea the general GNOME community likes best.  I've
found that, with Open Source, need isn't nearly as important as want,
with the average set of developers.  ^,^

> 
> > But then, some of the "usability" studies we've had don't
> > seem to work out quite as well as we'd have liked.  Making such a study
> > accurate is very hard.  You have to test a *lot* of people, in a
> > professional test environment (online polls aren't very accurate), with
> > a variety of skills levels and familiarity (look at the fights we've had
> > with the changing of Yes/No to No/Yes in the GTK/GNOME dialog).
> 
> Yeah, but it's not likely to be any less accurate than the "who can
> yell louder on the mailing lists" method of deciding. :)

No, certainly not.

> 
> > If a person can't so much as speak the truth here, then this isn't the
> > place developers should be discussing things.  We had to pick KDE
> > because, among other things, GNOME 1.4 just can't compare to KDE 2.x. 
> > With GNOME 2.2, that may be different (GNOME 2.0 looks like it is going
> > to have the exact same UI problems).
> 
> Saying the need for easy access means KDE over GNOME, and that GNOME
> "just can't compare" to KDE, isn't "speaking the truth", it's stating
> your opinion, which, without backing it up with specifics, is pretty
> much a flame. Now if you wanted to talk about just what KDE features
> made you think it would be a better fit for your users than GNOME, or
> just what changes you think GNOME 2.0 should be making that it isn't,
> that's an entirely different story. But "GNOME sucks, KDE rocks" 
> doesn't give anyone much to work with. I'm sure among KDE users your
> perceived shortcomings of GNOME are common currency, but I'm guessing
> they're not among GNOME users, or GNOME 2.0 would be doing something
> about them. :/

Actually, the three biggest misfeatures of GNOME are *constantly* talked
about, by both GNOME users and non-GNOME users.  Those would be, since
you are curious, the file selector, the difficulty of configuration, and
low amount of integration.

The file selector is terrible.  The only thing nice about it is tab
completion.  From an average idiot point of view, it's unusable.

Configuration is a pain - the control center is not laid out at all in a
useful way for newbies/idiots.  And, generally, you can't get to the
control center from the places a user would expect (i.e., entering the
MIME type/URL handler from within the Evolution display settings, where
a user would want to control the display of MIME attachments on their
messages).

And integration is poor... GNOME 2.0 should be better.  Integration
means anything from the above mentioned configuration problems to the
general lack of applications that work together.  I want to see how much
the GNOME 2.0 apps help with that - the problem seems to be based
largely on architecture, which is what GNOME 2 changes the most of.

GNOME developers in general seem to work like I do.. rewriting the
underlying architecture of the apps/systems 10 billion times and never
getting much work done on the part the user sees.  ^,^

KDE does not have these problems.  It's only problems (and the reason I
don't use KDE myself) is that its slow and tends to crash a lot.  But,
for our users, that isn't just a big deal, since most of them are used
to that anyways.  ~,^

> 
> (Of course, by this point this discussion should probably be on the
> usability list anyway...)
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gnome-devel-list mailing list
> gnome-devel-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-devel-list