Re: [Nautilus-list] Usability - death of options 1

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Вячеслав Диконов <sdiconov mail ru> writes:
> Replaced by the "_right defaults_" FOR WHOM? IN WHICH SITUATION? 
> Replaced by the _smart behavior_... Does this mean that you have
> incorporated ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE into a filemanager? Rename Nautilus
> to "SkyNet" then, and sell it to the military :) 

Your argument doesn't make any sense. Each program the size of
Nautilus has literally thousands of defaults and smart behaviors. 
Some arbitrary subset (40 or so) of those are currently chosen as
preferences instead of having the program decide.

Advocating that they should all be preferences is just dumb - clearly
most of them should just have a nice default or smartly do the right
thing. Programmers have to make decisions about that.

There's a cost to making something a preference, which is that you
confuse the user with more stuff in the prefs dialog, and you force
the user to make a decision instead of making the decision yourself.

Therefore the first step when considering a preference is to be sure
you can't just fix the default behavior.

Simple common sense. Insisting that all the thousands of variables in
a program should be user-configured makes no sense - the way you
configure all those is called "C" and the process of configuring them
is called "programming." ;-) We don't want to require users to program
the application before they can use it.

If you aren't saying all the thousands of variables should be prefs,
you're saying the line should be drawn somewhere. And the line I've
explained is IMO the right one. If you want to advocate a different
line then great, but don't just claim that all preferences are good.

Havoc