On Fr, 2008-01-04 at 22:17 +0000, Alan Horkan wrote: > On Fri, 4 Jan 2008, daniel g. siegel wrote: > > > Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2008 22:30:52 +0100 > > From: daniel g. siegel <dgsiegel gmail com> > > To: "usability gnome org" <usability gnome org> > > Subject: [Usability] cheese usability review > > > > dear all, > > > > while the ui of cheese gets described as quite good by some and as > > pretty bad by others, i would like to discuss the ui and usability of > > cheese and even enhance it to be full HIG compatible. i am not a > > usability expert and the ui of cheese was done step by step without even > > thinking about people with handicaps or other usability features. > > therefore it would be very nice if some of you could post their opinion > > about cheese and what we could do better. > > Been meaning to get on to you about that early on during the Google summer > of code but neglected to follow it up when I failed to get it to build > (could try harder). I had only become familiar with Photobooth shortly > before you started Cheese and was very pleased to see someone trying to > bring the same kind of simply powerful, brilliantly-obvious-in-hindsight, > and effective idea like that to Gnome. ;) > > Clearly Cheese is inspired by Apple's Photobooth application so my first > question is what have you done differently and why? As the developer of > Cheese you probably already know on some level what might be missing, with > a little nudge you will likely end up answering your own questions. > yeah, i often hear "hey he just made a photobooth clone". but i just must say, that the apple guys made a great job. apples photobooth is imho a great program from usability point of view. on the other hand i dont want to rip everything off, but its pretty hard to invent a user interface which has a good usability. > First thing first please please please revert to using a File menu. I was > very dissapointed when I read the latest release notes and saw that change > had snuck in. There is ZERO benefit to the inconsistency of having it > labelled something else. For those of us who use keyboard navigation it > can be quite annoying and it creates unnecessary work for translators. > (Putting the brand name "Cheese" front and centre might not be much fun > for translators, hard to know if the expression even makes sense in other > cultures, and it is wiser to avoid hardcoding the brand name, you never > know if you might want to change it later.) youre absolutely right with the translation issue, but on the other hand it doesnt make any sense to put "file" over there, as cheese does not save or open any files... > > I know the HIG has a mile-wide-exception that people claim encourages them > to ditch the file menu but it is not intended to encourage inconsistency > or shameless branding, it is there to describe task based applications > like for example games or a calculator which dont have the usual file > operations such as Open, Save, and Close/Quit. > > > I definitely want to try to compile Cheese again and play with it in > detail because I'm interested to see if you can really Keep It Simple and > avoid feature creep. It is all too tempting to add more and more special > effects and video features, keeping it simple is a harder trick. sure, go ahead! thanks a lot for your mail > > Keep up the good work. > -- this mail was sent using 100% recycled electrons ================================================ daniel g. siegel <dgsiegel gmail com> http://home.cs.tum.edu/~siegel gnupg key id: 0x6EEC9E62 fingerprint: DE5B 1F64 9034 1FB6 E120 DE10 268D AFD5 6EEC 9E62 encrypted email preferred
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