Re: Arlo, a little QA comment regarding your interview with linux.com

["Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero" <famrom idecnet com>]

sullivan eazel com (2000-10-25 at 0917.30 -0700):
> > > I understand your point, which is that some "preferences" are really just
> > > features that aren't used much, and are thus relegated away to a preferences
> > > dialog rather than being put into a more obvious place in the program.
> > What about options that user never use cos never think about them or
> > cos they are so hidden than user preffer keep in one mode, but would
> > use more if they know about them / were easy to change? How can that
> > options be detected, so the can be put in a better place, and docs be
> > writen explaining what the do?
> Part of the answer here is to design the set of features so that things are
> clearly labelled and logically grouped, and thus nothing is too difficult to
> find.
[...]

See another part, you already found it... but it is too complex. A
famous case is the multilevel menus. Gimp suffered it in past
versions, now you dettach a menu and you can use a set of filters
quickly. I guess in some cases what is needed is to implement some
rare features, that after some real world usage, make sense to the
point of wondering why never anybody implemented it before.

Now that I think about, has not the panel a small entry that allows
people to change settings on the fly? I guess it is doable, some
basic, but not obvious, things can be done this way (without removing
the depth config system like "All properties..."). Well, I guess that
NS as example was a really bad idea, they are pretty anti user, IMHO.
OTOH Gimp is improving towards user, with minor problems that are
forgotten as quickly as you play 5 minutes with it ("where is the
menu?" "right click image").

Thanks for the comments.

GSR