Re: [Usability] Gnome Usability

[Daniel Borgmann <daniel borgmann gmail com>]

On 5/17/05, Tom McLernon <tommclernon shaw ca> wrote:
> I copied these into the Linux Fonts Folder and they seemed to
> work fine, there seems to be more than one font folder in Linux, in fact
> several.  I don't know which systems get their fonts out of which folders,
> but it seemed that each folder contained a specific type of font, since mine
> are TT, I loaded them into the TT folder. 

The easiest way is to use the hidden .fonts folder in the user
directory. This can be reached from going to Preferences -> Font
Preferences -> Details -> Go to font folder. Unfortunately this
doesn't seem to be extremely well known yet, so often users get more
complicated responses when they ask about it.

 
> I never
> could find the hardware Set-Up, to install drivers, make hardware
> adjustments etc. even after I drilled down on just about every menu.   My

Unfortunately this would be pretty pointless right now, because Linux
doesn't even have a non-geeky way to install binary drivers. Basically
drivers have to be custom compiled for each kernel. The only
reasonable choice is to distribute drivers and updated kernels through
the distribution's package management system.
Hardware "adjustments" is very generic. Usually, hardware should "just
work" and not require any adjustments. Traditionally any kind of
hardware configuration has been left to the distributions (mainly
because GNOME works on lots of distributions and even operating
systems, all with their own requirements), but this seems to be
changing slowly with gnome-system-tools, etc.


> more sophisticated clock functions etc.  

What are you missing?


> In the help pop-up
> boxes, a single question and not a double barrelled question, asked in the
> positive and not in the negative form.  I don't know what it is about
> programmers but they always seem to ask questions in the negative format. 
> "would you like to close the program without saving this file?"   YES / NO
> The confusing double barrelled and negative.   What is wrong with:  "Do you
> want to save this file?"  YES / NO.  

Which application asked you that question? There are some very
specific guidelines regarding dialog questions, but not every
application is following it. Often it helps to kindly remind the
programmer about it. If you are curious what the GNOME interface
guidelines suggest, you might want to read this:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/
Especially the part about confirmation alerts:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/windows-alert.html#alerts-confirmation
Of course third party application developers might decide to ignore
the guidelines if they want to, but often they just didn't have the
time to check and are happy if you provide them a friendly pointer.

Daniel