Re: Some things I think GNOME should improve



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'.



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