Re: A different point of vision (was: Appearance capplet)

[William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>]

Hi Luca,

I'm not sure your evidence supports your conclusion.

I agree that changing the font size (basically the scale of the
screen) is an important thing.  I've written up some thoughts on this
here:
http://live.gnome.org/Design/DesktopFontPreferences

Also, in some cases using a text-only toolbar items makes sense too.
See gmail for example.  However, this is something that really doesn't
fall into the same category of user preferences that desktop
background and font size do.  We should try to figure out the
appropriate design for these sort of things.

The appearance panel is pretty conflicted today.  We should probably
have a panel that is specifically about personalization and not
customization.  Maybe a rule of thumb is - things that are likely to
change based on external conditions, whims, fancies.  Of course,
personal computer accessibility is a closely related concept.  So, the
needs-to-be-written Universal Access panel would likely have some
overlap here.

In my opinion, things like background art, screensavers, and font size
are in scope.  Things like the choice of icons in menus or editable
menu shortcut keys are clearly not.

Jon

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Luca Ferretti <elle uca libero it> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> sorry to start a new thread, but I strongly desire this email will not
> missed in previous *cough*flame*cough* discussion.
>
> I've recently started helping a man to use and maintain his computer. He
> was a professor of engineering at university, but he had an ictus some
> years ago and now he's able to move only his right arm and head. He
> recently started to use Linux, and we switched from KDE to GNOME 4 weeks
> ago. We could say he's a "virgin of GNOME"[1]. No bias, no strong
> interest in GNOME vs KDE vs MacOS vs Win. Just "I want to use this
> fuc***ng computer".
>
> Some days ago he asked me how to enlarge the text on screen, so I showed
> him the Fonts tab in Appearance preference tool[2]. Then we explored the
> other options available in this tool.
>
> In the (infamous and so hated) Interface tab he found really useful the
> ability to change the setting for toolbar items, and he chosen to stay
> with "text only", saying he prefers to read a label then try to figure
> what an icon means.
>
> What's the point of this? Well, firstly report that some people actually
> use some "weird" setting, secondly that even if unused, some preferences
> are better to stay in a "visible" place then in a not-yet-available
> tweak UI or gconf-editor[3]. Someone could need them or, at least, will
> appreciate their availability and discoverability.
>
> When that man used the Interface tab to adjust the setting for himself I
> was really proud that "my" GNOME Desktop was able to provide something
> that was useful. I really hope GNOME we'll be able to keep this level of
> user-friendship.
>
> Cheers, Luca.
>
> [1] insert a sexist joke here :P
> [2] OT: this should also tell us that font settings are not immediately
> discoverable :|
> [3] another OT: honestly I've a bad feeling with any sort of tweak tool
> in GNOME. We already have gconf-editor for "real" tweaks, adding a GUI
> tool to pack options makes me feel we was unable to choose the proper
> ones and put them in the proper place :(
>
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