Re: [Anjuta-list] Usability [Was: question]

[Dave Cridland <dave cridland net>]

On Mon, 2002-06-03 at 06:08, Biswapesh Chattopadhyay wrote:
> <snip>
> 
> > I think we need to do some sort of USABILITY testing/survey.
> 
> Exactly - as I said a week or two back, I did some informal usability
> testing on some VB users at my office and the results were *most*
> disappointing :-( It seems that some of our best features are hidden
> away behind obscure menu items, context menus and badly worded text :-(
> I've some urgent work that I need to finish today but I'm hoping to do
> something about it in the coming weeks. Hopefully some of the
> improvements can go in before 0.1.10.

[I'm about to criticise lots. Developers of a sensitive disposition
should remind themselves that I'm using 0.1.9 very happily, and nothing
in this nor anyone else's list has stopped that.]

I'd second that. I'd also point out that, in as much as I can tell, CVS
isn't present at all in 0.1.9, even though there are windows and things
which suggest that perhaps they are. A proper release should not imply
that features are present which are not. Snapshots are, of course,
different.

Some dialog boxes aren't - dialog boxes that is - so my WM settings
allow them to disappear under the main app window, much to my annoyance.
Perhaps I'm doing something funny, as usual.

The terminal - great feature, but I wish it knew when the mouse was over
it, since that's how my actual windows work, and I keep hitting F11 when
the focus is there, and getting confused.

The Project and Message windows seem to be sticky when undocked, which
I'm not sure about. Possibly just a bad choice of WM settings, but I
can't figure out why.

As a general note, if there's two places for a menu item, then please,
put it in both. If there's a huge amount of stuff to put in the context
menu, have some preferences stuff that allows you to change which chunks
of menu appear directly, and which in a sub-menu. And if you want to do
a semi-MS style of moving commonly used menu entries from the sub-menu
to the top level of menu, that'd be fantastic.

Another general note - your users are programmers, so you may think
you've an excuse not to make things easy. But bear in mind, please, that
I, for one, want to spend my time writing software in Anjuta, not
working out how bits work.

And finally, does anyone have any plans to make Anjuta have a sane
interface to help create the configure.in stuff? There was a helpful box
asking me for "library checks", but I didn't realise it wanted me to
enter M4 stuff there. An interface to that would be wonderful.

Again, I *like* autoconf/automake, I just don't want to bother learning
the depths of it if I can avoid it. I'm lazy, that's why I program
stuff.

> Also, is there any opposition to a 'Tip for the day' feature. It's MSism
> for sure, an I personally always disable it, but it definitely serves a
> useful purpose for more complex applications. Feel free to open a RFE on
> SF if anyone thinks this is a good idea.

Personally, I like them. I turn them off, too, once I've got the basics,
but I read through the whole lot first, mainly because some of the tips
- "Did you know you can open a project by ..." - come up after I've
already performed that action with no help at all, whereas other tips
that I personally need - "Anjuta can automatically debug your code for
you according to what you really *meant* - just hit F13" (Oh, how I
wish) tend to come up after I've figured out how to do it (often the
hard way).

But as I said right at the beginning, none of this stuff prevents me
from using Anjuta very happily. I've tried countless IDEs and editors,
and so far Anjuta is by far the best under Linux of the ones I've used.

I know that it's fast approaching MSDev - in fact, it's easier than
Visual Studio .NET in a lot of respects.

Dave.