[Nautilus-list] Re: [Usability] user levels, etc.

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

(Getting nautilus-list address right this time... nautilus-list
readers may want to find my original mail at:
 http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2001-November/msg00115.html)

Adam Elman <aelman users sourceforge net> writes: 
> For instance (and this is hypothetical, so if you disagree with this,
> that's fine :): most people will want to be able to customize their
> GTK theme.  Fewer will want to assign custom colors or custom fonts
> beyond what the theme specifies.  So you have a theme selector, and on
> the theme selector dialog is a button that says "Customize Colors and
> Fonts..." which pulls up a secondary dialog to do that.

I'd agree that all apps should do this as their normal UI. The power
tweak thing is basically an escape valve to be sure we can let vocal
minorities get what they want without hosing up the normal UI of the
application. (As far as I understand, user levels were also supposed
to be such an escape valve; however I think they are overkill, and
clutter up the normal UI, and complicate things for the app
developer.)

> And if almost nobody will ever use a preference, then why have it at
> all? 

Basically because the "almost nobody" is really loud and complains a
lot. ;-)

I'm even in that category from time to time, I use a few settings that
would definitely be ridiculous to have in the normal UI.

Essentially, we need a way to make everyone happy, and power-tweaker
is a way to do it that doesn't hurt average users. Note that I don't
say novice users, I think even most of our core technical workstation
audience would rather not have as many settings as we have now.

Havoc