On Thursday, 20 January 2005 19:49, Giles Robertson wrote: > 1) Fgrun/fgfs. > For the average windows user, this is *highly* counterintuitive. In so > far as Windows has an overarching user interface and tool design > philosophy, it's integration. The concept of a GUI that launches the > program doesn't make sense to them; they expect to be able to run > flightgear, and for it to present a menu that reads something like "New > flight"/"Saved Flight"/"Options"/"Exit". I'm not saying this is the way > we should go, but I'd like to note that many users, when presented with > the current method, get *very* confused, especially by the absence of a > flight planner. Many also find restarting FlightGear in order to change > aircraft counterintuitive
I couldn't agree more with the above. However I feel a launcher app will be successful if it is more tightly integrated with FG to the point where the user cannot distguish that they are two separate applications. I was busy writing a new launcher that would control FG through the Telnet interface including being able to flip between the launcher screen and FG screen automatically. This app would include aircraft selection, airport selection and a flight planner. Unfortunately I got side tracked by more interesting things like taxiway editors. :) I would like to add one more thing to the required list for 1.0 : We need errors to popup in a dialogue if FG is unhappy. Users keep coming to the IRC channel and they say that "nothing happens" when they launch FG. They have no idea that an error message is being displayed in file 13 and in a lot of cases they don't know how to run programs from a command prompt to get an error message or they run fgrun and still see no errors. Most of the potential user base will come from the Windows platform so we do need to make things easier for them even if our *nix roots scream otherwise. With those users will come artists, sound editing people, programmers, people with access to useful information, etc. Paul _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
