[slightly offtopic] Re: [Usability] Themus usability

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Dan Zlotnikov wrote:

> > your original other theme than remembering what it was called.  Smells
> > like a bit of a hack to cover up for a missing feature though :) (I.e.
> > some sort of proper undo/revert/rollback framework for preferences.)

mmm, rollback ...

> I thought about it while writing it, too. The only other alternative I can
> think of (an easy one, that is) is to have the selection be called
> "yesterday's theme," and have it display exactly that. Of course, then the
> problem simply becomes one of time. If I changed the theme three days ago,
> and I haven't been at the computer since...

if the current theme is not exactly available (ie it contains custom
changes from the default theme, a modifed Crux for example) you should
prompt to save current theme before changing something (only very roughly)
like:

Your custom theme needs to be saved
[ $username-$themename-custom-001 ]
	Discard 	Save

You should not need to keep saving themes.  You will only need to save the
first theme.  After that you will only be chaning between themes that you
already have safely saved on your computer and unless you make custom
changes to them (for which there is currently very little user inteface)
you wont need to save them.

If i am not being clear enough looking at how Microsoft Windows does
it might help.  Right click on a Windows (98 to 2000 behave similarly,
AFAIK) desktop, choose properties, look at the Appearance Tab and see how
it handles different Schemes.

> As for this being a hack, that's precisely what it is :) I was under the
> impression that we're in a freeze right now, so the aim is to get
> something that's better than no option at all, but won't take too long to
> code.
>
> >
> > Novel as Themus is, I think the lesson here could yet turn out to be
> > "file managers don't make good preferences windows"...
> >
>
> On how to *not* do this: Under Windows, you have the context-sensitive
> menu in all browsers that allows you to set the current image as the
> desktop background. This results in an entry in the display properties

Some users love this, I hate it.  Far too many times I have overwritten my
desktop with some stupid background.  In fact just yesterday in gThumb I
slipped and set a screenshot of a dialog window as my background (I prefer
GQView).

> called $BrowserName Background.
> Should you change that image using the same browser, there is no way of
> reverting.

There should be a new file created, the current file should not be
overwritten.  The downside is how quickly you fill you hard disk with
background images, especially on windows which (by default) only allowed
Bitmaps to be used for Desktop images.  The alternative of setting your
desktop as a webpage was unbearably slooooow, on some machines the
differnce between a using a background image and not, is actually
noticabley slower.  I even suspect on my crap hardware using RedHat it
makes a small differnce to the redraw speed to have  large detailed image
rather than plain blue or suchlike.

Life was simpler when I did realise exactly why I found computers so
annoying, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/