Re: [Usability] Some Small Suggestions for Evolution, Abiword and GNUmeric

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Tue, 10 Jan 2006, Sarah Berry wrote:

> Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2006 18:02:22 -0500
> From: Sarah Berry <sberry grex cyberspace org>
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: [Usability] Some Small Suggestions for Evolution,
>      Abiword and GNUmeric
>
> Dear GNOME Usability Community,
>
> Thank you for your constructive feedback regarding my last suggestion.
>
> I now have a few other small things I would like to raise with you:

And so it begins...

> 1.  I would love Evolution to have a keyboard shortcut for the "Junk
> Mail" feature.

1.  Sounds like an entirely reasonable request and I would recommend you
file a report against Evolution in bugzilla
http://bugzilla.gnome.org

You might also want to see if Evolution drops a configuration file in
~/.gnome2/accels which might allow you to manually (by editing a text
file) configure the keybindings.  If Evolution does not do this it would
not be an unreasonble request to ask them to do it, so that even if they
do not agree with your choice of keybinding you do have some way to change
it (even if it is a somewhat overcomplicated way of configuring
keybindings, at least it will be possible).

You cannot please all of the people all of the time so I've been meaning
to ask *all* Gnome applications to dump an accels file to at least make it
possible to reconfigure keybindings without recompiling (even if editing a
configuration file in a text editor is less than user friendly).  I
encourage you all to check your favourite applications and ask them to
provide an accels file and give a little more flexibility to advanced
users who want to set unusual custom shortcuts.

> 2.  A sidebar, providing e.-mail previews, like that provided by Google
> Desktop on Windows.  (I do not know if the Beagle tool provides some
> such functionality; as a Fedora user, I have not had this installed.)

2.  Much as I like Google I'm not familiar with what you describe as I use
windows infrequently.  More description or even a screenshot might help.
Is this search sidebar in the web browser (epiphany), or in the file
manager (nautilus) or somewhere else?  Hopefully you or someone else can
describe this in a little more detail.

> 3.  In your office applications, such as Abiword and GNUmeric, I would
> like to see a non-modal, floating palette for all formating options.
> Having used most WYSIWYG word processors over time, I personally found
> the Lotus WordPro offering to be by far the most usable.  Obviously this
> is subjective based solely on my own experience but there were a number
> of concrete reasons for this.

3.  There is only a loose affiliation between Gnome office and Gnome and
although we can make suggestions we can only encourage them to make
changes.  (I have a feeling you and I discussed this suggestion before in
Abiword Bugzilla.)  Abiword like OpenOffice does have a Stylist palette
but it is no where near as 'featureful' as what Lotus uses. (Lotus uses a
tabbed pallete with 5 or 6 tabs filled with all kinds of formatting
options.)  Far as I know Gnumeric doesn't have quite as much styles
functionality or a styleist Palette (but I haven't check more recent
versions).

> 4.  One final usability issue I wish to raise pertains to saving
> graphics in web pages.  The right-click and "save as" method has never
> struck me as particularly intuitive.  A few days ago, I opened a number
> of thumbnails graphics out across different tabs.  I then had to go to
> each tab and successively right-click and save them.  This struck me as
> unintuitive and extremely tedious.
Could therebe an option to "save all
> graphics" on a site?

(I strongly recommed you invest some time and learn wget an excellent
command line utility.  Once you have learned how to use it, you can quite
easily download lots of images.)

I'd love if easier ways to scrape images off webpages existed.

One trick from Windows I quite liked was clearing out the "Temporary
Internet Files" then visiting a site and copy all the newly cached images
out.  Unfortunately gecko based browsers obscure files names in the cache
(using some kind of hash algorithm) which means you cannot use this trick.
I would like to be able to have a really huge cache and have an easy way
to sort through these files later when offline.  I should probably chat to
the Epiphany developers about this but I'm sure they are mad busy already.


>  Secondly, if I have pages open across multiple tabs, could there be an
> option to "save all" open sites?

Mozilla and Firefox (and probably epiphany) have an option to bookmark a
group of tabs.  With the multizilla extension Mozilla will remember
whatever tabs you had open when you quit mozilla.

> Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Good night and good luck!


Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org
Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

P.S.  Incidentally do any localisation experts know if "computer dialog"
should really be translated to "dialogue" or not on the basis that
"computer program" does not get translated to programme (as in television
programme, British English).