2009/10/21 Paulo J. S. Silva <pjssi...@ime.usp.br>

> In my humble opinion this is one of best ways to end a conversation:
> takes your "opponent" point of view and turn it into a caricature that
> make it sound unreasonable.
>

Well, I thing exposing the weaknesses in other people's argumentation is at
the core of any real debate. I'm not trying to say that he's completely
unreasonable (he isn't indeed!), I'm only implying that his argument is not
as community-oriented as he may like to make it sound.


> As far as I can see Owens point is that we don't need such a radical
> "one size fits it all" minding set because that is not really possible
> in all cases. One size does not fit it all always. I don't think that
> everybody else that asked for customizations wanted
> "my-customized-to-the-last-pixel-way-or-the-highway". Usually we ( I
> have already asked for customization in this list) want a way-out from
> what we consider bad UI decisions that are really making our life
> worse when using Ubuntu.
>

While it is true that one size cannot fit everyone, when dealing with UI, it
is surprising how certain sizes can actually fit incredibly large numbers of
people. Almost by principle, customization detracts from finding such a
sweet spot. This is why good designers try their best to avoid it.


>
> For example in the osd-notify positioning, adding the possibility of
> selecting one of the corners would be enough. It would be certainly
> enough also to hide such option requiring gconf-editor to change it.
>

This would be enough for you, of course, because you would just fire
gconf-editor, change the option, and never think of the problem again. I
think Mark's point was to avoid precisely this, and I agree with that
entirely. By adding the option, we're just dodging the problem, not solving
it.


> Can't we just see that in some cases it is *really hard* if not
> impossible to find a default setting that would not step on many
> peoples toes and add a gconf-entry to select it? If an UI decision,
> for example, generates a bug reports with hundreds of comments it may
> be a good indication that the decision is not good for a very large
> number of people even if it is good for most of the people. Then we
> can work really hard to find the best default setting without really
> left part of our community behind.
>

Changes to a user interface almost always cause some irritation at the
beginning. Most users just live with that, because they don't have another
option, but we computer experts know better. We can fiddle with the
computer, so our tendency is to look for the option that lets us put the
thing back where it used to be and forget about it.

I bet that most of the people who are complaining now are reacting precisely
like this. They see the change, sort of don't like it, look for the
give-me-back-my-old-environment option, and become pretty much upset when
they don't find it. Their next step is to log into Launchpad as quickly as
their fingers permit. I bet that most people who aren't computer experts
wouldn't bother at all about notifications slightly changing their position.
Actually, most of them won't even notice the change.

Now, that said, you are right in that options may be the right solution in
some cases, but such cases are rarer than you think. Finding a proper
solution is hard, and, in this case, it may take several further attempts to
find something that works really well. It is just too early for giving up.

Cheers,

M. S.
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