On Apr 5, 2007, at 7:58 PM, Matt McLeod wrote:
Now you get a menu option in the same place as the old one which
brings up a web-browser-like window which pulls together those same
vaguely-related things plus a few others
^ I'd say that's the real problem right there.
There doesn't seem to be any willingness to *take options away*.
Lots of studies have shown that, on average, most people are happier
& more productive when presented with a narrower range of options,
not a broader one. Software preference systems need to take this in
to account.
The more exposure to different systems I get, the more I find that
I'm happiest with the ones that hide all but the very most common
knobs & switches from the normal user interface, and if there's
anything else that an advanced (or, more often, too-clever-by-half)
user would like to tweak, provide a completely separate interface for
getting at that. For example:
* Firefox has a preferences dialog, but you can also poke around in
about:config, or go spelunking through various Javascript config files.
* The Mac UI gives you System Preferences and preferences for most
apps, but you also have the BSD layer and various plist files (often
in XML) that you can tweak by hand if you want.
* The Ubuntu UI seems to be doing the same thing, with simple GUI
wrappers around things like apt-get, etc.
* Most "web applications" -- blog engines, wiki engines, etc --
provide some customization for web accessing users, a few more for
web accessing admins, and gobs more for admins with shell access.
Et cetera.
The vast majority of the time, for the vast majority of people, there
really should just be one clearly thought out and minimally
implemented standard way to adjust these kinds of things. I don't
care how it's implemented so long as a reasonably intelligent person
with at least some proficiency in modern computers can get the result
they're after in under, say, a minute of poking around.
...
But anyway, to go back to the original problem that set this rant
off, keep in mind that the instigator here was the display resolution
spontaneously & without provocation reducing itself. As far as I can
recall, nobody even had their hands on the keyboard or trackpad when
it happened. Maybe that's a hardware hate, or maybe it's software, I
don't know, but spending 10 or 15 minutes trying to get that back to
the way it had been didn't make it any easier to solve the problem we
were really supposed to be working on...
(And I'd still like to know why pretty much every Windows laptop I
come across has provided a completely different vendor-provided
mechanism for connecting to wireless networks. The only common theme
is that they all take way too many steps to go from "turn on
wireless" to "select a network". I can think of at least a dozen
approaches to this problem and not one of them reduced it to the two-
step process that it should be. And I can't tell if the Windows-
provided procedure is any better, but I assume it must not be because
all these vendors are trying to override it...).
--
Chris Devers
