Re: A call to action / AUI

["Christopher D. Beland" <beland MIT EDU>]

Kevin Cullis <kevincu orci com> asks...
> Do the two guys you worked with have any documentation left? 

The MIT Athena User Interface project is documented at:
http://web.mit.edu/aui/notebook/

We do have some UI designs floating around on its web pages, most of
which we don't have time to implement, and which haven't gotten proper
critiques.  The ideas which come to mind as most relevant to this list
include:

 - A design for a much more user-friendly session management system.

 - Turning the Gnome Menu tree into an extensible, modular system,
    parts of which are maintained by disparate entities.  (Solving the
    problem of catalogging the huge body of software which is
    available for users to run - on any one of three supported
    platforms - off either local disk or our networked file system.)
    I am actually in the process of populating the default menus for
    usability testing later this week.

 - The need for a Gnome-wide "program chooser" dialog.  There are
    several occassions (adding programs to menus, running programs not
    on menus, adding programs to session management lists, opening
    files of unknown type) when you need to pick a program off a list
    of all possible programs; it would be nice to have a standard way
    of doing this.  (This is particularly relevant to our situation,
    where we have more software than users can conveniently have on
    their menu system.)  We are hoping Nautilus will have a component
    for doing this that can be used by other programs.


We're also prototyping interfaces to our campus-wide printing
(lpr/lpq), authentication (Kerberos), instant messaging (Zephyr), and
user help (OLC) systems, though little or no work has been done on any
of these since the beginning of the academic year.  Usability testing
is supposed to start this week in support for eventually asking the
senior department administration for a final go-ahead for deployment.
Eazel has expressed interest in anything we find out about Nautilus,
which we're going to include in the process once it's stabilized.

-B.

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Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS)   -   MIT Athena User Interface Project              
                   http://www.votenader.org                   
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