Re: Ease of Use?

[Karl Gutenberg <GlueSoft gmx de>]

Hello,

i think i can dare make this a fundamental thing. 

IMO an ideal GUI imposes no need to be taught anything. A GUI gives you a 
framework to explore a given set of functionality step by step. You see 
elements on the screen and you know how to use them, or you can learn, with a 
rapidly increasing learning curve, if the program obeys the look-and-feel 
guide of a platform.

An ideal CL interface to a software allows you to access all of the software 
functionality in one step. This step can be simple as with "cd, mv, ls, mcopy"
and other programs and it can become really weird as to reading through many 
pages of a manual to find the correct set of options..... and making calls of 
many hundred chars in length. But it allows for total automation already 
which is why most people need or love it.

I personally do love Emacs for its combination. What does make this 
combination possible? Well, it's the scripting fascility for each and every 
aspect of the software. 

Would I care to hunt for a menu item, when i know the command's name, no. 
Would I normally know the command name? No....

So if you are talking of forever newbies who rightfully mean to minize the 
effort spent to using software (Emacs as editor is my main tool, so the 
effort pays back, otherwise I'd never have cared....) you are missing the 
target....

I indeed believe that ideal apps should be scriptable. In an ideal world, 
everything a user does, invokes a scripting-engine with some command. As 
such, it would allow you to have a prompt that invokes commands, etc., 
ideally not bound to single language, but with bindings to all popular 
languages with a reasonable default.

You mentioned Evolution... and you critizied it being too close to Outlook in 
some design pure looks aspects. Well, you ought to realize that Evolution is 
not solely about GUI, it's a app architecture tailored to bring services to a 
desktop, like addressbook-server and friends, all indepent of the GUI!

Evolution will evolve in steps I bet. As usual. :-)

Reproducing aspects of well knows GUIs is not a bad idea. I found the Outlook 
GUI always compelling. I just hated where it limited me. Every GUI improses a 
limit..... But you seem to forget.... if people don't like the GUI of 
evolution, they can fire Glade off and make it something different, any day.

I am almost sure, you can find somewhere in the source the glade file and 
rearrange or change the GUI elements to your needs.

If one thing is desireable, it's that Evolution gets stable REAL SOON NOW. 
Email is still the most important internet app.

So if I was to make priorities, I would suggest to get Mozilla, Evolution, 
Gnome2 and StarOffice for Gnome stable as soon as possible. In my own 
opinion, Nautilus is overestimated, but it sure will add to the critical mass.

Karl