Re: Trivial suggestions for enhancement

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 15:34 +0200, Tobias Wolf wrote:
> On Mi, 2008-07-23 at 13:03 +0300, Nick Palamarchuk wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 8:42 PM, Rui Tiago Cação Matos
> > <tiagomatos gmail com> wrote:
> >         On 21/07/2008, Tobias Wolf <towolf gmail com> wrote:
> >         
> >         99% of people (i.e. non-geeks) don't even know what an IP
> >         address is...
> >         
> >         Rui
> >  
> > 99% of people don't know what is Linux )
> 
> Thanks for the input.
> To give closure to this spur of offtopic-ness, 99% of people are linear
> combinations of the stereotypes of grandma and the kernel hacker, and
> the rest are formed by luddites like the unabomber who don't plan to use
> NM in the future. Even the pure grandma will appreciate that your
> question "But did you receive the right IP Address? Check..." will not
> be followed by "Terminal ... mumble ... ifcnfg".
> This question was one of the first questions I had to ask -- back when I
> was running the private DSL for 25 fellow students -- when someone new
> called and gave me the "Internet no worky" complaint. Usually this meant
> I had to walk up there because there was no way to talk them through
> four layers of nested Windows networking GUI ("Right-click down there,
> lower right, no, right mouse button, yes, Connection Status, then change
> tab, then Advanced, now Details, ah, we have to enable DHCP,
> right-click, down...").
> This leads to:
> 
> >So i think Tobias has a right idea. Usability of NM menu is far from
> >ideal.
> 
> I would say it's a lot closer to the ideal networking GUI than anything
> else I've seen so far. Especially the 0.7 cycle brought many nice
> improvements like the nm-connection-editor, which gives clearly arranged
> access to all connection types.
> I was merely proposing a few logical changes to wording and layout that
> are possible for 0.7 still. The point of the sidenote in my last email
> was that I observed that there's two ways now to edit the VPN config.
> Via the right-click menu item, and via the VPN submenu. The submenu
> stems from the NM 0.6x times when there was no nm-c-e yet.
> 
> Meanwhile, there are two more settings I would like to discuss:
> 
> 1. "System setting" -- Is it clear enough what this does? How about
>    "System-wide connection"?

Not done yet, but I'm playing with making that an actual button at the
bottom-left, because we need the vertical space to add a Routes...
button in the IPv4 page.

> 2. "MAC address:" -- Is this to spoof the MAC (no), or is it to limit
>    the connection to the NIC specified by its MAC here (yes)?

At the moment, this will lock the connection to a specific device by MAC
address.  One suggestion was to have this be an editable combo box, with
the dropdown listing devices currently in the system.  Still need to be
able to enter something random though.  But the label likely needs to be
changed.

I'd also like to have an option to spoof the MAC address, but we'd need
to figure out where to put this in the UI.  There's actually not a lot
of room left because we're hiding things like the port and speed that we
don't yet support.

> What about adding bubble help for these? People would have to ask fewer
> questions on mailing lists and forums, right?

Yes, tooltips or some other form of quickhelp is the plan here.  Even
better would be adding a Help... button to each dialog and actually
having good help via yelp or whatever.

Dan