From: Jesse W (jessw@netwood.net)
Date: Wed Apr 23 2003 - 15:36:12 EDT
Sorry if this is better put to another list, or is otherwise inappropriate.
Feel free to re-post this elsewhere.
I am writing to alert you to various problems I have observed in the use of
Abiword by non-technical people(i.e. my mother) The problems are not
specifically technical problems, more communication and organizational
problems.
My mother is nearly going to quit using Abiword due to the fact that, when she
updated to version 1.0.4(at least, that's what it says on the About box(I don't
know if that's correct.)), and tried to open documents she made in Abiword
format before the update, they came out with odd squares at the end of most
lines, which could not be removed and had various other problems. This,
besides being irritating, caused her to totally refuse to update further, as
she felt that it was stupid and ridiculous to risk further problems for the
vague hope of fixing one caused by updating.
The real problem here is not the technical problem, nor even her unwillingness
to update, but the fact that both she and I, after looking pretty hard for
quite a while, could not find out how to resolve this problem of updating. The
"Check for Updates" item on the help menu is broken and results in incorrect
and contradictory info; the list of versions on the website is not clear and
seems contradictory(although this could be fixed with some explanation of
stable and development releases), and there is generally insufficient
explanation of how to identify if a bug has been fixed, and what a non-
technical user could do about it.
Regarding using Bugzilla to check if a bug has been fixed, my mother, when she
started using Abiword, was expecting and hopping to use Bugzilla for this
purpose(as well as filing bugs in it.:-), but has not been able to do so (at
least, not without considerable help from me.) She is not sure exactly why
this is so, but she says it feels "technically oriented, not for infrequent
use." Possibly one of the various front-ends might help.
Sorry for the rant; I know that all of you have done, and are doing, a lot of
wonderful work for free, and aside from the problems addressed above, Abiword
works great. (I use it quite happily.) I, and my mother, are grateful for all
the work you have done, and offer these issues as help to allow you to be
aware, and hopefully improve, Abiword.
And if there is anything I can do to help, please let me know.
Jesse Weinstein
---- http://netwood.net/usr/jessw
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