Re: [Usability] [RFC] Proposed AbiWord preferences dialog mockup

[Dom Lachowicz <domlachowicz yahoo com>]

> > 1. Why not move the statusbar and ruler prefs
> directly into the view menu.
> > Would make access to these much quicker.
> 
> Dont have the latest version of abiword in front of
> me but I am fairly
> sure they are also avialable in the menu.

These are available in the View menu and probably
should be removed from our prefs dialog.
 
> > 2. I thought there was a global gnome pref for
> cursor blink, wouldn't be
> > better to use this pref?
> 
> Probably, I expect the developers were not aware of
> this global
> preference if you could confirm that you didn't
> imagine it I expect they
> would add it at some point.

If there is, please point me to it. How GTK+ does
cursor blinking underneath the sheets is downright
unusable/non-extensible.

> > 4. Why would you disable tooltips?

I think that this is a good candidate for removal.

> > I can't pin it down, but it seems like most of
> these prefs are technobabble.
> > Shouldn't the right to left prefs just work
> automagically based on locale?
> 
> Ideally yes but it is more complicated than that,
> for now the option has
> to stay.

If there was a way to auto-determine from (say)
locale.h what the preferred writing direction, paper
size, unit specifier, etc... was, that would be great.
As far as I know, there is no such single interface
for this type of information. Please do inform me if
I'm wrong here. This might be a good RFP for a
freekdesktop.org spec if there is none.

> > The glyph prefs are particularly crypic and
> meaningless to 99.9% of people i
> > would guess. Are there sane defaults that can be
> used instead. Seems odd to
> > have a preference for one specific language.

This only holds true if you think that .1% of the
world's populus speaks [Arabic, Hebrew, Yiddish]. This
may not be the best way to present this to the user,
but nonetheless, it needs to be presented (or at least
determined - see above about problems determining this
sort of stuff) somehow. We have a halfway decent way
of auto-determining this stuff, but it's less than
perfect.

> > You should default automatic save to on, thats a
> nice feature :)
> 
> It impacts on performance and is not really
> necessary.  Besides,
> (depending on compile time options) if abiword
> crashes a Document.CRASHED
> file will be created so you wont lose any data.

I'm going to have to agree with Alan. Auto-save is not
an obvious thing to have enabled and can have
undesirable side-effects.
 
> > 1. Kill the splash screen pref. Splash screens are
> poor excuses for long
> > load times. It is especially unneeded now that
> gnome has application launch
> > feedback.

Abi's load time is non-existant. Splash screens aren't
just for mitigating long load times (ala OpenOffice),
but also for marketing and branding purpose, and as
such, are desirable for us to have in there.

> I dont know if abiword supports startup notification
> yet.

Startup notification is built into GTK+, so yes, we
do.
 
> > 2. Why would you not automatically load all
> plugins? (legit question)
> 
> Performance.  Some plugins are a bit big.

Good question. I'm not sure if there would ever be a
case where we don't want to load any plugins, if they
are found. This is a good candidate for removal.
 
> > 3. Are preference schemes really necessary? Seems
> like something 1 out of
> > 1000 people will use.

I asked for this to be removed. A lot of other useful
discussion has happened off of the usability list.

Cheers,
Dom

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