[Usability]Ignore this one

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

ignore this one :) My mailer crashed when sending and I thought it
hadn't been sent.

On Sat, 2003-02-15 at 14:01, Seth Nickell wrote:
> http://www.gnome.org/~seth/Preferred-Apps-Mockup.png
> 
> Lets discuss starting with this mockup. In a week or so I'll try to
> recruit somebody to write our current design.
> 
> Here some thoughts I used to guide this design:
> 
> 1) Long term, the preferred applications system needs to either
> complement or replace the file types system. Having both is confusing.
> 
> 2) We need to show the same names/icons as the user sees in the
> Applications menu (consistency)
> 
> 3) The system needs to be extremely simple and quick or people will not
> use it. Minimize clicks, minimize clutter.
> 
> 4) Most of the time people will be picking applications that the system
> knows about... custom applications is a more obscure case so we
> shouldn't optimize the system around it.
> 
> 
> Here are some of the trade-offs/questions in the current design:
> 
> 1) Not "infinitely extendable" like a List would be. *However* a list
> would cause more confusion and clutter. There are more choices in
> interface design besides 0,1,n.
> 
> 2) How many categories of application should be here? Should
> applications be able to add new categories (I would say "no", since this
> interface only makes sense for things where we expect multiple apps
> fufilling the same role to be present on a system).
> 
> 3) How do we find out what category apps are in? Using the keywords
> stuff from the .desktop entries?
> 
> 4) In the long long run how does this relate to an Applications menu
> that contains only generic entries like "Web Browser" that are
> preferences driven as to what web browser they launch?
> 
> -Seth
> 
> 
> 
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