Re: GNOME Usability - General Questions

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On 02 Aug 2001 19:52:05 -0400, John Kodis wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 02, 2001 at 01:37:48PM +0100, Michael Rogers wrote:
> 
> > Let's concentrate on making a desktop that's as good as the Windows
> > desktop before we start worrying about 'a better desktop paradigm'.
> 
> Alright then, that certainly simplifies things.  Now there's no need
> for all this tedious discussion of usability -- we already have our
> guiding light for useability: Windows!  All we have to do is insure
> that we've faithfully cloned what Windows does, and we're done.
> 
> I had been hoping that there might have been some room for
> improvement.  It seems that I was mistaken.

If you read the documents we have put on
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup I think you'll find we have a
lot more planned than duplicating the windows interface. I think the
suggestion was not to provide an "exactly windows like" mode, but rather
to provide a mode that tailors default settings to what a Windows user
might expect. We are cursed with over-configurability, so we might as
well use it in the few places where its a benefit.

Think of this as akin to the Windows-like settings provided as an option
in gnome-doorman. We could provide a "mac-like" and a "windows-like"
(and of course a "gnome like", whatever that means) default settings,
this won't necessarily require any more code than already exists.

-Seth