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On Mar 1, 2006, at 12:56 PM, Tristan Wibberley wrote:
...
My Dad frequently stumbles over choosing between plain "log out" and
"switch user", especially when somebody else happens to want to use
the computer as he has finished.
Since locking the screen already has switch user functionality and
switching users already has locking the screen functionality, wouldn't
it make sense to merge switch user into the "Lock Screen" item in the
System menu?
That would solve your father's problem, but at the expense of making
switching extremely difficult to find. I rather think the item needs to
be renamed to express the idea that it's *temporary* switching. "Switch
User" is awful, awful wording.
On a related note, I think the Lock Screen item ought to change its
name, since it is not actually locking the screen (as the user
understands it), it is just locking their own session (of course, in X
Window System terms that *is* the screen, but most users don't know
about that). Most novice computer users think of "Screen" being either
the whole console (denial of service), or of the active dialog box or
web page (none of which are what is meant). I'm pretty certain of the
novice understanding of the word "screen" since my parents both use
the word "screen" in the manner I described and I used to work in an
office/labourer's depot full to the brim with computer novices and
nearly all of them used the word "screen" in the same way when
discussion computer actions.
Yep, when I worked in Internet cafés people would often come in and ask
for a "screen" (do you want a keyboard as well? ha, ha, ahem). And
IIRC, AOL did pretty heavy customer testing in coming up with their
term "Screen Name".
Windows and Mac OS avoid this issue by not having a "Lock Screen" item
at all, but having a quick way of activating the screensaver.
...
As even an advanced user, I was stumped as to what the difference was
between "Sleep" and "Hibernate" before I googled. Could "Hibernate" be
renamed to "Power Down (hibernate)", "Sleep" to "Standby (sleep)", and
"Shut Down" to "Full System Shut Down". Or something like that? Users
should normally just hibernate, and I think this name change would
make that obvious.
In the medium term, the difference between "Sleep" and "Hibernate"
should be abolished by letting Sleep suspend to disk *and* to RAM. So
if you have power, waking up works quickly; and if you lose power for
any reason, waking up still works. (This would also lessen the need to
maintain lists of hardware for which the "Sleep" command should or
should not be available.)
In the long term, the difference between "Sleep" and "Shut Down" could
be abolished the same way: the computer could automatically turn itself
off once it had been sleeping for a configurable period.
- --
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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