Joerg Barfurth wrote:
The strange usability scenarios may have played a minor role in the things that happened with that specification. But in the first place this is something where there was a real usability problem. If I get a document from someone else (e.g. by mail) it should not open at a seemingly random place in the middle. This may utterly confuse less experienced users.
Then, that person should have unchecked the options box. I don't know why SO many people, not just you, don't get this. If someone wants there doc to open at the top you had the option. If I want to continue editing a 40 page doc in the middle, I had the option.
Options are something that many users, particularly inexperienced ones don't understand and know about.
So changing something here was indeed necessary.
Maybe better help, maybe changing how the option was labeled, maybe making it so the default option was to open at top. Now editors and people working on big projects have been left out in the cold.
Yes. The simplest idea to solve the original problem would have been to change the default to open at top. This way people writing large documents - who can be expected to be more proficient with their text processor - can change it for their needs and newbies aren't surprised.
But unfortunately someone initially had the idea to make this a 'smart' feature so someone else's document opens at the top, but yours reopens at your last edit position. Attempting to really specify this behavior revealed that this kind of automatism is a bad idea. But the specification was started and so this took on a life of its own to specify and then implement something :-(
But the initial ideas to solve this with 'smart' automatisms were (luckily) recognized as flawed in time, so a simpler solution was sought. This is all well so far. But then under time pressure the remaining feature was further 'reduced' in a way that some functionality was lost entirely.
"Some"? All functionality was lost. Now it only opens at the top.
It still opens, doesn't it? So not all functionality is lost.
This was the place where noone noticed that doing only the final remaining step alone made no sense. But again starting that work was necessary. Only the execution was lacking.
Yes, the final execution was lacking. I just don't understand how whoever decided this would write a spec, say we will remove this feature, but we will add a shortcut to to make it work for those that need it and then just abandon the shortcut and now the issue is labeled OOo Later.
Apparently the suggestion to abandon the shortcut came from management, when feature freeze dates were approaching and people were fighting to get all their features done. And apparently noone really reviewed the consequences at that point and noticed that simply changing the default would be the far better solution under these conditions.
Will it happen in a future 2.0.x or are are talking 3.0?
Apparently that is not decided yet. Maybe you need to lobby some more or get people to vote for the issue to convince the responsible people that this really should be fixed in 2.0.1.
Joel, my wrath is not really directed at you. You are just the first person brave enough to talk to use about these things, and I would like to know the story behind this and understand why these changes are made.
My name is not Joel, but I think it is better if people understand how and why these things happen. The developers are overloaded and that may cause occasional mistakes.
Ciao, Joerg
(Now off to vacation)
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
