Re: Some things I think GNOME should improve

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

On Wed, 2013-04-10 at 22:31 +0200, Les Paul wrote:
> 2013/4/10 Marco Scannadinari <marco scannadinari co uk>:
> > "Very, very few users are using \"help\" and \"settings\" option"
> > How do you know this?
> I put this as an example:
> http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/09/14/do-users-change-their-settings/
> They made an experiment, and they concluded that "Less than 5% of the
> users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had
> kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program

Windows user == LINUX desktop user ?

> installed in.". And, as I told, I'm pretty sure "help" is even less
> used. When was the last time you used the help from an application?
> Applications are (or should be) developed to be self-explanatory. And
> for those which are too complex for that (Blender, for example),
> people just google it.

<rant>
Really???????  You hit an internet search engine *BEFORE* using help???
That is a colossal waste of time.  Actual documentation is much better
than sorting to a blast of internet swill;  google is not your friend,
it is a massive time waste.

Sorry, but using Help over Search is *crazy*.  I have users who did this
- they drive people bat @&&@*#@ crazy,  they spend all kinds of time
trying to 'figure out' things that are plainly and clearly documented -
and the documentation is *correct* and appropriate to their version,
rather than the rambling speculations of what some internet dweeb posted
*years ago* to some forum.

Ugh.
</rant>

> But I'm not talking about removing these
> options. I'm talking about moving them to another place, where people
> that need them will still have them,

But why?  It is an established convention, why mess with it.

> Precisely I'm talking about moving "About", "Help", "Settings" and
> How do you know that Alt+F4 closes the window? You just learned it at
> some point. I like the idea of having a close button next to the icon
> too, but it could look kind of ugly or weird. On the left side of the
> icon, you could close a window accidentally trying to click the dash
> menu. On the right side, the title bar size depends on the title of
> the window.

-1 Close button.  Close can be destructive, it should be a very
deliberate application specific action.

> > Software is not like hardware, or a chair, in that you will not need a
> > manual. Each peice of software is different and is not neccesarily
> > familiar to each user, so they will probably need a manual or help.

Yep

> case. Anybody needs to use Banshee or MPlayer to look for help. They
> are pretty intuitive.

Yeah, ok.  But personally I don't much care about those applications,
they are a waste of a desktop.  Real applications like spreadsheets,
media *editors*, mathmatical tools, data analysis tools, IDEs, etc...
will need documentation [aka help].  What they do cannot be
'simplified'.