Re: [Usability] "About" menu items galore...

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, Eric Larson wrote:

> Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 09:26:23 -0400
> From: Eric Larson <elarson novell com>
> To: Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>
> Cc: usability gnome org
> Subject: Re: [Usability] "About" menu items galore...
>
> On Wed, 2005-07-13 at 20:53 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> > I've thought about getting rid of About dialogs before because most are
> > badly used and fail to tell you about the program.  As a beginner tried
> > using About dialogs and what I most wanted to know was something like
> > "This is a Word Procesor", "This is an Image Viewer". Thankfully the
> > GtkAbout dialog does as much as it possible can to get developers to
> > provide a sane About dialog with useful information that users can easily
> > cut and paste out of there if they need to.
>
> >From what I have seen in testings, most users pay little to no attention
> to the about dialogs. I really don't see this as a problem personally
> and in fact I think it would be a shame to steal take this issue away
> from developers. The reason I say this is because the about gives a
> great place to show the contributions people have made as well as offer
> the user a chance to see the open source method in action. Since it
> doesn't get in the way it seems like a great place for developers to add
> a little bit of their own personality and get a well deserved moment of
> fame. Just my two cents on the issue.

Yeah that too.  It almost goes without saying.

I love being thanked for my efforts and some projects have an extensive
list of people they thank, anyone who has ever provide a line of code
or filed a bug report in one or two rare cases.  Others only mention
the maintainers (a missed opportunity in my humble opinion).

Some programs like the GNU Image Manipulation Program hide fun easter eggs
in their about dialog.

While I'm writing I may as well mention that when developers allow me I
have taken to putting a contact address (usually the mailing list address)
directly in the main panel of the About dialog.  This ensures it will be
the first address users find and increases the chances of them using it
rather than mailing the authors directly, without needing to resort to a
less subtle warning note not to mail the authors like KDE uses.

Might be something other developers would be interested in considering.


I still think it would be a fun hack to Gtk to turn off all About dialogs,
or override them like how Wine overrides the About dialogs of some
Microsoft applications.  Open Source makes these kinds of rebranding
changes possible anyway, the standard API should make it almost easy.

Sincerely

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