I agree that non-technical users are not the audience for Leo. However, if someone is just looking to check out a tool to see if it is worth adopting, then no matter how technical that someone is there is only so much trouble that he or she is willing to bother with before writing it off and spending his or her time doing things that he or she cares about more. There have been many times I've seen a tool on the internet that I thought *might* make my life easier, but then decided wasn't worth it after the installation turned out to be too much trouble, even though I in principle could probably have gotten it working if I had spent an arbitrary amount of time figuring out everything that was going wrong.
The point of minimizing the barrier to installing a tool is not to make it accessible to the lowest common denominator, it is to maximize the chance that a potential user will go to the trouble of checking it out. Cheers, Greg On Dec 28, 2011, at 9:41 PM, HansBKK wrote: > A lot of attention is paid to usability in Leo, but I can't imagine it's ever > been intended for normal end users. If anyone claims it is, then they haven't > had much experience with real normal end users. I have been the techiest > person at every job I've ever had over many decades, which totals thousands > of people, and I'm the village idiot around here. > > And say you make it super-easy to install, (which currently happens to be the > easiest thing about Leo 8-) then once Betty secretary got it up and running, > what is she going to do with it? Having a reasonably high "barrier to entry" > at installation time ensures that even if someone isn't a programmer, at > least they are able to follow instructions, and figure things out to fill in > the gaps. > > Note this is pretty much par for the course for most of the powerful tools in > the FOSS world - say you want to set up Apache with PHP and MySQL to run a > wiki, and then figure out how to get it to authenticate and authorize user > groups from an existing LDAP server. Not too many "end-user friendly" tools > in that space - which is also much more of a close-ended system than the > infinite flexibility Leo offers. . . > > Now it probably wouldn't take **that** much work to package a fork of Leo to > work as a decent note-taking outlining tool, or a filesystem meta-manager, or > a to-do tracker/project management system, but only one of those use cases at > a time. Then all the features that aren't directly relevant to that > particular use would need to be "hidden" if not actually removed. > > And somehow I don't think that is what the current developers want to spend > their time doing, not to mention who would handle the much larger volume of > support questions that would come from such users? IMO Leo is intended > primarily as a tool for Python programmers - and I'm sure non-Python > programmers could also get up to speed pretty quickly. For the rest of us, > it's a pretty steep learning curve - well worth the climb (I'm sure) but not > like say getting to know Photoshop. But of course I shouldn't be speaking for > the developers, all the above is sheer speculation on my part. > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "leo-editor" group. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msg/leo-editor/-/AWNi6PGWnM8J. > 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. -- 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.
