[Usability] locales

[Thilo Pfennig <tp alternativ net>]

I carry some thoughts about "locales" in a wider sense with me for a
while.

I think that common approaches often do not fit. Or I realize that
applications all ask me the same very often.

things to consider:

a) location. We must consider that people with laptops fly trrhough
timezones. Maybe they like one time zone, but maybe it is also nice if
there could be a relation between GPS location and time zone. I also
would like to see a world clock integrated in GNOME for our GNOME
advocates that travel around the world. ;-)

b) where do I live or where I am and what do I need? There could be
default values for the home location but also the possibility to change
units for a while. Imagine somebody from the US coming to germany and
wanting to print on a standard printer. They mostly use A4 instead of
letter. On the other hand many units will never be used by standard home
users. In Germany we migth use A5 and A6 besides A4 but very very
unlikely "Letter". I think units that are seldom should be hided in
order to not confuse people.

c) There are other units like Inches/Centimeters and Celsius/Fahrenheit.
They also should be set default.

d) the languages

What I find quite astonishing that I often have to set the ruight units
even if I have clearly set where I live and what language I prefer. I
set the paper size every day because Firefox and some GNOME applications
do not remember.I would delete the "Letter" paper size if I could
because I have never used it in my whole life time. I t looks like
"Letter" is a default paper size on many applications. Why? I think
paper size needs to be set at installation time like the time zone. Then
there is no default value where the paper size could be reset to.

I also have to choose languages (for spell-checking) and units very
often. Many applications (like Abiword) seem to ignore the locales that
are set. I think this are issues US users never have, as a german user
it is a daily experience.


I would say it is time that these issues get solved somehow.


Setting all these settings on installation could also be easy:

1. ask user where he lives
2. now we set default settings and have options for setting different
language as the main language in the country. (and other things)

bye,

Thilo


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