From: Rui Miguel Silva Seabra (rms@1407.org)
Date: Sun Apr 28 2002 - 18:45:16 EDT
On Sun, 2002-04-28 at 18:58, Alan Horkan wrote:
> > This is pretty cool; for now I've hardcoded the increment as being 10%.
> > Maybe that should be a pref.
> Did you read Havoc Penningtons recent usability essay, "too many
> preferences".
> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/21/051228&mode=nested
Havoc's argument has many flaws, most of which are based on the
assumption that all users are dumb. When he says must, he means 99%
which is, in practice, all.
Nautilus and sawfish had (sawfish now doesn't and nautilus probably will
loose it as well) three layers of options: novice, intermediate, expert.
With each one, more options would show up. That was nice.
John Harper argumented that you found yourself going into higher levels
to set a common option, and moving options around wasn't helpful.
I can only find one answer for this: all options where in fact usefull.
Some where never touched by maybe 60% users, but 40% users probably used
one or another.
> That seems like a good sensible default i really doubt that a pref is
> necessary.
Yes it is, the whole mouse wheel effect should be controllable (in text,
how many lines, pages, etc, for instance).
> Perhaps if you put it in Abiword.Profile but dont put it in the
> frontend GUI.
This is a bad option, specially if it is done like most that don't have
a GUI option to set them: they're not documented.
What Havoc cries is completely wrong and here's why:
Even though you're an 3133t hax0r, you're naturally lazy.
If you can have all your options in the same dialog, set or not set,
you'll find faster what you need than if you have to read (INSERT LOADS
OF DOCS) just to find that teensy option (if it even exists at all).
Unfourtunately, and maybe this is SUN's fault, there are a lot of
people that are very blinded by such marvelously flawed statements like
Havoc's.
Hugs, rms
-- + No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown + Whatever you do will be insignificant, | but it is very important that you do it -- Ghandi + So let's do it...?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sun Apr 28 2002 - 18:47:56 EDT