First, please let me just say that the following are just my thoughts to introduce a different perspective on the Leo project and you all are free to ignore or dismiss them if you wish. :-)
An impression I have gotten from my occasional lurking on this list is that people like to talk about the things that they can do to attract new users, with the conversation often evolving into the best way we can show people all of the possibilities offered by the Leo outline toolkit. Personally, I think that if Leo is really interested in users then it should first try at the very least to produce a product that is easy to install and that doesn't have so many painful bugs out of the box. It also wouldn't hurt if basic configuration tasks, such as setting the fonts, had a simple dialog box (like there used to be) rather than making the user dig around a separate settings outline for them. I understand that the whole point of Leo to most of the people on this list is to provide a powerful Python-powered toolkit for viewing and manipulating data using outlines which means that the user should be encouraged to figure these kinds of things out for themselves, but this has seemed to come at the cost of producing a product that is easy to use for people who just want the most basic features. Personally, although I have been using Leo for years, I would switch away in a heartbeat if there were another project that had the same essential feature of representing text files as outlines but which had an implementation that was more stable, easier to install, and easier to configure. Having one-stop installers would be a particularly nice feature for me because it would give me much greater confidence that other people looking my code would actually be using Leo to view it and hence would getting the birds' eye view I had created for them via. the outline, rather than deciding that going through a multi-step process to install a tool they'd never heard of is more trouble than it is worth and then getting annoyed that my code has so much line noise in it. Now don't get me wrong, if the community is happy having Leo be a relatively niche tool that provides a lot of power for a relatively small community of power users then there is nothing wrong with that, since plenty of tools have thrived well enough by taking that route. :-) However, if it really is a serious goal of the community for Leo to become a widely used tool, then it needs to place a much greater emphasis on improving and polishing basic usability issues than it has so far seemed inclined to do. Again, though, this is just my own perspective, and I have no expectation that my opinion deserves to be weighted more than slightly since I have contributed relatively little to the project compared to many people here. :-) Cheers, Greg -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor?hl=en.
