Re: Thinking about Dogfood

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

some might argue that if you are lost in a terminal, you have no
business trying to compile something :-)

anyways, comments below.

On 06 Aug 2001 13:01:26 -0400, Aaron Weber wrote:
> Hello world,
> 
> I've been thinking recently about the ways that we can expand
> our audience for GNOME. We want GNOME to be totally friendly, but is it
> really?
> 
> Think about this:
> * Most GNU/Linux and UNIX users would be lost without a terminal.
> * Most computer users would be lost *with* a terminal.
> 
> What sorts of things do I do in a terminal? How about...
>   $ locate ".mp3" |grep aphex
>   $ gcc foo.c (insert a billion compile-time options here)
>   $ cat /etc/httpd/conf/http.conf |grep "mystuff"
> 
> Honestly, one ought to be able to find a file, write and compile a
> program, and administer apache, without a command prompt. Without pipes.
> Can I? Not really.  Sure, there's Comanche. There's Nautilus.  There's
> gIDE. But are they as easy to learn and easy to use as the competing
> proprietary tools?  Why not? What can we do to make them better?
> 
> How are we going to attract a larger developer base? How are we going to
> attract a larger user base?  Will Jane VBScript feel like our tools are
> improving her productivity? Will Joe "Has it got the Internet On it"
> Sixpack want to use our desktop to post his eBay auctions?
> 
> Someone wrote in to us recently and suggested that "If you want GNOME to
> be really usable, force all the programmers to stop using a shell, and
> watch them hack it until it is."
> 
> That would be a little drastic, of course.  But how many of us actually
> use the GUI tools we develop on a daily basis? Not enough. Can you
> imagine doing your work without a terminal? No? That's a bad sign. You
> may have the terminal if you want it, but *you should be able to go
> through a day without it*.
> 
> Don't say "It takes too long to click through the filesystem." Nobody
> clicks through the filesystem on a Windows box.  They 
> type Windowskey+F and search. On a Mac its Apple-F. Or they type the
> path in the location bar and expand it. It remembers where they go and
> offers suggestions. Nobody spends all day in a Windows box traversing
> directories or typing in commands.

I agree with the last part, but I know for a fact that my mom and sister
don't know about searching. They traverse the enture directory
structure. My mom is the "I'm scared of computers" type and my sister is
the "I'm comfortable using computers" type. I'd say she represents the
"average" computer user.

> 
> Don't say "I'm an expert, this is the best tool for me."  Don't say "You
> can't take my terminal away from me."  I'm not trying to do that.
> 
> What I'm saying is, for a few minutes every day, try to put yourself in
> your user's shoes. Open Nautilus on a daily basis and clean up your home
> dir with it. Check your mail with Evolution at least once a day. Use
> gIDE or Anjuta to compile something. Spend some time dogfooding, and
> report your findings (constructive and polite!) to the bugzillas and to
> your friends.  If it hurts, that's GOOD-- you're fining what needs to be
> fixed. I'm going to do this more, and I'd suggest that you do too. The
> future of GNOME depends on it.

Now I think most people at Ximian at least can honestly say they use
Evolution 5+ minutes a day ;-)
I don't know a single Ximianite who doesn't spend a good 50% of his day
using Evolution!

As far as Nautilus, I use it mostly for 2 things:

1. (and most importantly) "oooooh ahhhhh...this is so beautiful" *drool*
[okay, enough drooling...close the Nautilus window now - time to get
back to hacking Evolution]
2. looking at a directory full of jpegs and png files and the like
(because hey, it's nice to see a thumbnail of all tigert's pr0n).

Pretty much the rest of the day I spend staring into emacs... I don't
think I ever have a need for looking at/navigating directory(s) since I
spend 99% of my time in /gnome/cvs/evolution/mail.

Well, that's my excuse anyway...and I'm sticking to it! ;-)

Jeff

> 
> Aaron Weber
> Ximian, Inc.
> -- 
> "Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet,
> consectetur, adipisci velit . . ."  Cicero
> 
> 
> 
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