Re: GNOME Window Manager

[mawarkus t-online de (Matthias Warkus)]

+++ Wed, May 30, 2001 at 04:24:51PM -0700 +++
Lion Kimbro e-mails me. Film at 11. Reply right now, after the break.
> http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_pres/text24.htm
> Customizing Fonts
> 
> Most users went straight to Control Center
> Users commented they were looking for "Properties", "Settings" or "Font
> Size" 
> Comments about unfamiliar terminology
> "I don't know what a Sawfish Window Manager is" 
> "I don't know what themes are" 
> When given a hint, "I would never have guessed the 'Theme Selector' for
> fonts 

This is a not a problem related to window managers.
 
> http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_pres/text25.htm
> Customizing Fonts
> 
> In Sawfish Appearance capplet:
> One user spent 10 minutes there before clicking the "Browse..." button to
> bring up the font selection dialog 

This should (like the theme selector capplet) use a GNOME font
selector widget instead of a text entry with a Browse button.

> "I'm frustrated- I was in the right window and didn't know it" 
> "I'm still not sure what this will be affecting"

That's a problem with the capplet layout.

> In Desktop Theme Selector capplet:
> Found "use custom font" checkbox "annoying" and "not useful" 
> 2 users overlooked the checkbox completely, focusing instead on the
> grayed-out font name button 

Capplet layout again... It's hard to solve this, maybe make it a radio
button group where one can choose between "Use font specified by
theme" and "Use own font".

> http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_pres/text26.htm
> Customizing Fonts
> 
> Then we told them there was another place in gnomecc to change fonts, could
> they find it?
> "Why is that? Why would I have to go to separate places? Why would you make
> it that difficult?" 
> "That's unnecessarily complicated, why not have it all in one place?" 
> On being told they had to go to Nautilus to change some of the other fonts
> they could see on their desktop:
> "I wouldn't expect to go to three locations to change the font" 
> "That's cumbersome, I wouldn't like that" 

Here the question is: would a user want to have the same font used
everywhere in the GUI? If yes, it'd make sense to have GNOME-wide
default font setting. If no, we've got to ask ourselves where
different choices are in order and where they should be grouped.

>   But there should be a default GNOME window manager that is completely
> invisible.

You have showed us several flaws in the GNOME user experience, but
only one of them (i.e. Sawfish does use the default font specified in
gtkrc, but has its own setting) is related to the window manager. And
that one would be trivial to fix.

I'm less than impressed by your argumentation. Don't get me wrong: I
can see your point. But that utterly invisible window manager vision
of yours is a solution in search of a problem, I think there are more
important issues around that deserve the manpower that would go into
writing yet another window manager.

mawa
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