Re: [Usability] Chabada's Suggestions

["Simon Francis" <thejello gmail com>]

Why does Gnome open non-free document formats that have related patents
(Word, Excel, etc) but not multimedia files? I would consider it
essential for a modern desktop to open either and a major barrier to
adoption.

On 6/21/06, Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie> wrote:

On Mon, 19 Jun 2006, David wrote:

> Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 22:03:49 -0400
> From: David <sberry grex cyberspace org>
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: [Usability] Chabada's Suggestions
>
> Dear All,
>
> I am not sure if you have seen this article (apparently it appeared on
> SlashDot). http://chabada.sk/better-desktop/

I've seen it but I'm not sure it was discussed here on this list.

I probably read about it on OSNews
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=14152

A lot of the suggestions could be dealt with directly by filing bug
reports and feature requests and I think a few may have been filed already
by the author.

> Progress notifications, information about multimedia codecs and

We really want to encourage people to use free and open formats and avoid
vendor lock in problem which in the long run is a far worse problem.  It
might even be good idea to offer to transcode files to better formats
before offering to install codecs for encumbered proprietary formats.

Part of this "problem" is up to distributions and what they choose to
include.  Gnome doesn't include proprietary codecs and this stance is
unlikely to change but some distributions do add them back in and give
users what they think they want.

Another part of it is education, to try and make sure users understand we
cannot play formats such as MP3 out of the box due to legal hazards.
Much as we might like to ignore the issue and give users what they want we
cannot afford to as it will not go away and will only get worse.

Fluendo and gstreamer do seem to be working at making it easier to install
3rd party codecs but we cannot achieve the ideal ease of use and without
undermining other goals.

> automatic music pause would all lead to a more intuitive systemi.

the notion of pausing music has been discussed before, I dont recall if
there was any conclusion or ideas on how best to go about implementing it.

> The comments about displaying more relevant data in Nautilus are also
> worth taking on board.

I think the author may have posted those directly to the nautilus list.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org
Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

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



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