> Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2009 17:45:56 +0200
> From: Soren Hansen <so...@ubuntu.com>
> Subject: Re: Properly identifying applications
> To: ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com
>
> If you put yourself in the place of someone who is not used to
> Linux: You have a document you want to open (and for some reason
> you don't just click on it in Nautilus, but let's ignore that
> for a little bit). How are you supposed to know to look
> for something called "Evince"? How is
> having that name in the menu going to be helpful?
Sorry, I guess I didn't make my point clearly; I'm not advocating that
the menu entry just be "Evince" but rather something like
"PDF Document Viewer (Evince)"
See the KDE4/Kubuntu menus for an example of how this can elegantly be
accomplished.
I still object to the specific designation "Document Viewer" as it's
simply false:
evince foo.doc
and
evince foo.odt
do not work, so this is most definitely NOT a document viewer. You're
confusing users by calling it that. (For the technical users who view
ps/dvi files, there can be another menu entry called "Postscript/DVI
Viewer (Evince)".)
> I couldn't disagree more. The no-brainer choice it exactly to NOT show
> which application is being invoked. What's important is the task it
> performs, not what it's called. If the user needs to know the name of
> the application he's using to do something, we're doing something
> wrong. To view documents, you use a document viewer.
> If we change the default document viewer at some point,
> the user's experience shouldn't change. They shouldn't have
> to know that we've replaced Evince with FooPDFViewer.
> They should just keep using "Document Viewer" and have the
> best possible experience.
While this philosophy makes sense when dealing with relatively naive
home users, it falls a bit short for power users and institutional
(large network) installations. Let's take the case of power users
first. All programs have bugs, otherwise your point would be better
received. Working in an environment where people are frequently pushing
certain kinds of applications to the limit, we're aware of dozens of
specific issues in different programs. For example, depending on
precisely what a user is trying to do, I will recommend that they use
acroread, evince, or xpdf (usually after one or the other has failed at
fill out forms, or printing, or properly rendering certain kinds of
documents -- in extreme cases, we have to invoke pdftk). Changing the
underlying program without letting anyone know is an excellent way to
completely annoy power users.
The situation with institutional users is even worse. With >300 linux
machines, we use an automated installation system to install packages on
machines and keep them up to date. Every time we upgrade to a new
ubuntu system, we have to first install 1 or 2 machines using the
Desktop CD in order to try and figure out what Canonical has decided to
change, particularly in the user interface, about which ordinary users
are most apt to complain. Forcing me to put on my Sherlock Holmes hat
in order to deduce that, say, evince is no longer part of the default
distro, is not the way to make new friends.
So to repeat: The ideal is a system which is sufficiently friendly for
naive users while not unnecessarily impeding the work of power users and
administrators. Yes, this is a challenging task, but Microsoft Bob
should provide some indication of what happens when you only cater to
the former group. <:)
--
Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list
Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com
Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
