Re: [Usability] user levels, etc.

[Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert ximian com>]

On Tue, 2001-11-13 at 00:04, Havoc Pennington wrote:

BTW, sorry about writing a bunch of replies at once for this thread, but
I am on a plane and being bored is a nice time to read mailing lists :-)

    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 the stereotype of a "normal male computer user user" *IS* a PRO if
you ask him.

    > 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. ;-)

Sometimes it surprises me how quickly people forgot about editing their
.fvwmrc and stuff by hand..

I mean. In MacOSX you can have the really cool but useless terminal
transparency turned on with a command line app. So the noisy annoying
people like me who absolutely wanted to see iTunes equalizer move under
the terminal that one time could do it.
    
    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.

Like Maciej once said, it gets just annoying for experienced users since
you never remember which tab of the 17 preferences sections had the one
checkbox you wanted to toggle.. We are weird users as hackers, we have
strange habits, and everyone has it their own way even. So there is no
way to present all the permutations in an easy to use UI for
preferences. Or at least I think so.

The powertweak is an idea that might work, one could just make a
gigantic checkbox nirvana tool where one could write plugins for all the
things on certain applications. Heck you could even have PowerUserPref
Themes.. "Havoc's PowerDesktopBindings -- get yours NOW and flip 'em
like the PRO's do at RedHat!" :-)

Tuomas

-- 
:: :: Tuomas Kuosmanen  :: Art Director, Ximian :: ::
:: :: tigert ximian com :: www.ximian.com       :: ::