[Usability] Re: Proposed AbiWord preferences dialog mockup

["David Adam Bordoley" <bordoley msu edu>]

Dom Lachowicz writes:
> > > 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.

What I meant was that even within users using those languages, few will have 
an understanding of what those prefs mean. Much better to do this behind the 
scenes and have it work automagically. 

> > > 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.

see my other email. I think saving in general is non-obvious, which is why 
so many people seem to forget to do it despite our best to prevent it. 

>  
> > > 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. 

tog has a pretty good article on usability vs. branding [1]. Splash screens 
reduce usability in favor of branding. I won't belabor the point though. 

dave 

[1]http://www.asktog.com/columns/048GoodGrips.html