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Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 12:45:58 +0200
From: Staffan Ringbom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Organization: Swedish School of Economics and BA
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Re: feedback.
Dear, Lars
Thank you for your nice reply.
Could you forward my request to be added on the
"user mailing list for lyx".
Here comes my honest thoughts about LyX.
If you regard this as "junk mail just" fine, I can take that.
(Not expecting a reply)
About LyX
1. It's a damn good program once you get used to it.
2. Would be nice if it become good enough in order to knock
out Scientific Word out of the market.
3. Important that LyX gets very popular.
4. The more popular LyX becomes, the bigger are
the ecnomic network effects. (Would you buy
a telephone, if you would be the only one in the
word using a telephone. Nobody is interested
in an odd program, if nobody is using it).
Good PR -> more users, negative PR -> die hard.
5. The more popular LyX becomes, the more important
is the finish, in order to get rid of bugs. Visible bugs, is only
bringing
negative PR.
6. About user friendlyness.
The current attitude with the help system
is read the documentation and make experiments
with the examples. Just fine for me.
With this philosophy, the quality of the
examples and the provided templates is
of #1 importance!
There are only 3 important points to take care
of; if the of LyX is to survive as a vital and really useful program.
a) The user base should be increasing rapidly in order to achieve and
maintain a strong position among users. (Think this is the case at
the moment)
b) There should be enough "SWIFT-transfers"
to PGINNOKK 0540 0336093
c) There should be an active devlopment of
the program. Including user feed-back.
I very well know that the intearaction between
a) b) and c) is simultaneous.
I see the potential new user base among people who switch from
windows to Linux and those using MAC-OS. The easy part is people who do
not have
access to scientific word but would need something of the kind.
(Some goodies that might attract those user could perhaps
be taken into consideration in the development)
The MAC users might be a more demanding user group
than the Linux users are. However, if you succeed with
an expansion to the MAC users, I have to congratulate
you!
In the next I give some thoughts for the potential development
of LyX.
I think that the look&feel in LyX should not
differ too much from scientific word (workplace).
Today the walk around different programs, should not
be any big deal. The higher the switching cost (=learning cost) in
adopting
LyX, the less users there will be.
However, LyX should definitely be a clone of Scientific word.
In my opinion it should be different in order to fulfill its own nisch!
To be available on several OS:s and GUI:s (with X as base) is a good
thing.
Nonetheless it might be good to whatch scientific word and ask the
users of SW
what they find especially useful.
(If there is somebody crazy enough to incorporate a symbolic math or
graphical program into
LyX that would be nice, but not necessry. I think threre is enough
with work on LyX anyway)
Below a few things in that might be worth a thought in developing LyX.
1. A meny that would easily assign shorts to macros
A popup with two empty rows.
one for a latex commands or lyx commands,
the other for the short cut key.
the assignment should of course give a warning or refuse the
assignment
if the short cut key is already occupied.
2. A what do you want help guide, is unevitable in the long run. (I
know that this job is less pleasant than
eating ones hat, but a more advanced help system would be the thing
they call MARKETING.)
I know that it is a pain for job for a program developer to have
to deal with
"fools" (people like me?). The better the program and the expamples
the smaller is the partition of "fools".
To attract scientific word users and MAC users
- that's the real challange!
I think I spended more than enough time on commenting LyX for a long
time to go.
Wish you all good.
Dr Staffan Ringbom
Swedish School of Econonomics and BA
Department of Economics
PO Box 479
FIN-00101 Helsinki
Phone +358-9-43.13.34.16
Fax +358-9-43.13.33.82
E-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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