Re: libgnome: User level

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Colm Smyth <Colm Smyth Sun COM> writes:
> To be honest though, it's far more important to think about designing
> a good user interface than trying to carve up it's features into
> easy, hard and impossible to understand. If everything is easy and
> natural, there doesn't need to be such artificial distinctions.
> 
> When a feature gets forced into a user interface by jamming a menu
> option onto a menu or a tab onto an already over-loaded dialog,
> you can't fix it by just hiding it sometimes; it's always going
> to be hard to understand and use.
> 
> As I have absolutely no idea how to design a UI for use by anyone except
> myself, I'm all too happy to ask for help from someone who can, like Calum.
> 

My view is that the advanced user level is basically a dumping ground
for crack-rock settings to avoid flamewars. ;-)

If we had some way to simply pick the good ideas and delete
e.g. nearly all the Sawfish or panel options that would be ideal. 
But I think there would be a lot of complaints if we removed those
options.

Michael makes a good point that user level should be global for "the
desktop" (users don't consider panel/WM/FM separate apps) but 
maybe specific to larger apps like Gnumeric.

Havoc