While Leo is constantly enriching itself, with new features and new technologies, it's not improving much in terms of user friendliness (I will provide details below), and this is one of the main reasons that put off (read: keep away) users. This is an old refrain of mine, and every now and then I feel compelled to express it, so bear with me.
Recently I was asked, on another thread: what is there to be done to make Leo more user friendly? Ahm, a lot. An awful lot. Before mentioning some of the points which IMHO need to be worked on, I would like to make a suggestion: why not keep track of the users' suggestions/feature requests in a more organized way? Lots of useful comments are made every day on the mailing list: adding this, removing that, etc. Most of them are soon forgotten, with the constant flow of new posts, and the ever-changing variety of topics. Moreover these suggestions are scattered here and there, often buried in threads where they should not even belong. What I am proposing is, basically, a system for keeping track of user comments/requests in a more organic way. It could be a wiki, or something else. Now, with regard to user friendliness, I would like to point out that IMHO, the best judgement in this regard is that made by the outsiders, or newcomers, rather than by the developers and the old users. For a simple reason: user friendliness is all about intuitiveness and giving a pleasant feeling to those who are *not* familiar with a program. And in this regard (sorry guys) Leo leaves a lot to be desired. Old time Leo users who are perfectly comfortable and cozy with the current setup may possibly not understand why this is so important. Some (only a few) of the areas that need improvement: * the leading node-type @ markers in the headlines are very ugly to see, and clutter the screen. Why not replace them with customized note-type icons? Of course, they are an important metadata, which should be preserved somewhere. But why make it a part of the headline? At the very least, could we limit their visibility to when we are editing the headline? * Changing settings is very awkward, as pointed out in several old posts. Something needs to be done. IIRC Terry already agreed on this in principle. * more standard default key bindings. For instance, what about F2 for editing a headline? I know, this is not such a big deal, because users can change the key bindings to their liking, but why not make things easier for newcomers? I do not want to insist too much here, listing all the finer points, but in short there are several other UI improvements that would be really welcome. I am venturing here a proposal for the developers: why not go in a sort feature-freeze mode for some time (i.e. stopping adding new features), and focus instead on improving the user interface? This dedicated period could be set on the calendar, perhaps even a couple of weeks every three months, or the like. I am sure this would generate a lot of user feedback. All the best, Dufriz -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
