On Dec 29, 2011, at 11:22 PM, Edward K. Ream wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 11:51 PM, Gregory Crosswhite
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Two very separate issues.
>
> 1. I agree that it would be better to have Leo install more simply,
> with a better one-click installer. However, I don't know how to do
> that. It's as simple as that.
On OSX one typically produces bundles that include all of the dependencies
needed by an application, which in this case would include Leo, Qt, and PyQt,
and also probably Python just to be safe even though technically OSX includes
Python. A little Google searching turned up
http://svn.pythonmac.org/py2app/py2app/trunk/doc/index.html
For Windows a little Google searching turned up
http://www.py2exe.org/
which looks like it does a similar thing.
> Leo's new daily build page actually goes a long way towards making the
> latest builds available to users. This is a big step forward, imo.
It is not quite clear to me why this is a big step forward since I would
imagine that the typical user would want the latest stable version, but my
perspective is clearly different from that of most here so there is no reason
to expect that my notions should apply. :-)
> 2. I am not aware of any "painful" bugs that would afflict newbies
> "right out of the box". Excepting on MacOS, which is not truly
> supported, and perhaps never will be.
Very unfortunate.
> Yes, Leo does have its share of bugs, but these should not prevent
> newcomers from forming a reasonable impression of Leo.
Unless they are running on OSX.
>> 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.
>
> Leo is the only project that is likely ever to have Leo's features.
That would be tragic, because it would mean that no fully supported software
with Leo's features will ever exist on OSX.
> And Leo *is* stable, 99% of the time or more.
Again, unless one is running it on OSX... but if your point is that on other
platforms it is incredibly stable and so my experience is unrepresentative then
that is certainly fair enough.
>> [Leo] needs to place a much greater emphasis on improving and polishing
>> basic usability issues than it has so far seemed inclined to do.
>
> I take usability issues seriously because I use Leo every day.
Yes, but in a sense that is a problem because as a power user your sense of
what makes Leo usable is not at all what a newbie would consider usable. :-)
For example, having many of the settings available in a GUI would make Leo a
lot easier to use, but this project doesn't like GUIs for that kind of thing
because of its focus on scripting; it used to have a dialog box to perform
some configuration, but it got rid of that a long time ago.
(Just to be perfectly clear, I am not saying that this is a wrong decision for
the Leo project to make, it's just that in my opinion this will make it harder
to attract more users who might have otherwise been drawn to the features that
Leo has to offer.)
> There
> are many usability-related bugs on the list, and I'll get to them
> asap. If you have specific complaints, please file bug reports.
I will continue to file bug reports for problems that I run into in the hope
that they will be fixed, though unfortunately the response I have occasionally
gotten has been "That simply will not work on OSX.", such as the bug I filed
some time ago that copying and pasting from node headlines doesn't work
properly and occasionally causes Leo to crash.
Unfortunately there is not much I can do about most of the things that I care
about because the Leo community clearly has a different vision of what Leo
should be about, where it should be headed, and what platforms it should
support, etc., than I, and because of this there doesn't seem to be much point
in me investing a lot of energy into it. When I started using Leo ~ 8-10 years
or so ago the focus of Leo was primarily to produce a good outlining text
editor, but since then the focus seems to have morphed into an outline
scripting toolkit for power users; if Leo had been more like what it is now
back when I was first looking into it there is a very good chance that I would
never have bothered with it --- but then again, clearly I am not the kind of
user that Leo is after now so perhaps it would have been for the best. :-)
Anyway, thank you Edward for the reply. :-)
Cheers,
Greg
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