On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 12:43, Glynn Foster wrote:
> Do people really use the quick launch stuff? 

Not under JDS, but under Windows XP that's what I almost
always use. But there I can completely edit it, so in my
case it's got Firefox, putty, and the VNC viewer.

I think one of the things I would have to say generally
about the JDS/gnome menus is that I really can't get on
with them. In particular, the ability to modify them
is something that I find essential to keep things under
control.

> How does its useage compare
> with say, a desktop icon or a panel launcher?

What desktop? That's valuable screen real estate. I want
to have running applications use that, rather than having
to keep half the screen area clear to find the icons.

In the case of JDS, I end up dropping launchers onto
the panel, but I don't find it works as well.

> Yeah, that's rather unfortunate as well. However, you seem to admit that
> there's a lot of merit in the current community layouts - perhaps we
> need to start from there, and see what absolutely *has* to change. I'm
> not sure 'familiarity with JDS 3' is altogether that important - do
> people really remember menu contents and locations? Would a new layout
> really surprise them a whole deal?

I think change generally is bad, as users rapidly learn the
menus and then automatically launch by place.

We had a lot of trouble when SDX shuffles the CDE layouts a
bit - my users almost universally complained.

(I also used to have a curses based menu system. Users
simply memorized the menu location. They all knew that
3 <RET> 5 <RET> would pop up pine, and we learnt very
rapidly never to change the place of an application
in the hierarchy.)

-- 
-Peter Tribble
L.I.S., University of Hertfordshire - http://www.herts.ac.uk/
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/



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