[198] in Athena User Interface
Session mgmt, MOTDs, HOTDs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Wed Jun 21 04:17:55 2000
Message-Id: <200006210817.EAA12255@No-Whammies.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 04:17:51 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
Some fodder for discussion on some choices we need to start making...
Session Management Issues
I'm seeing some problems with the Gnome session management system for
both usability and Athena integration.
- There should be some clear way to explicitly decide which programs
you want to launch on startup, persistently, vs. the ability to
leave windows up on the screen for your next login. Right now,
there's no distinction made here.
- There should be a graphical interface to explicitly starting
session-managed programs. Right now, you can add
non-session-managed programs in the Session Properties capplet, but
managed programs can only be added either by starting the program
and saving your session (which is awkward and confusing) or by
hand-editing ~./gnome/session.
- Only windows started from the Gnome Panel will reappear on next
login if you click on "save this setup" in the logout dialog.
This is a serious user confusion issue.
- Starting zwgc under the "non-session-managed" option of Session
Properties causes login to be really slow on the zwgc step, and I
can't tell why. I haven't tried it the other way yet.
MOTD Design Choice
Usefully, Gnome already has a startup message mechanism that checks a
file and displays the MOTD. It should be easily modifyable to run a
program instead, and we could have it call get_message by default.
The program pops up a window that can be dismissed with an "OK"
button. The window is a bit ugly, and I'd hope that we'd fix the
aesthetics a bit, and send the changes upstream. More importantly, is
has a "don't show this dialog again" button which is easily clicked.
I think this should be removed, so that the only way not to get the
MOTD is to hack your dotfiles rather extensively. Along with this,
though, we might want to not call get_message with -login, so that
each new MOTD is only displayed once. I dunno.
The alternative would be to just run get_message at startup and have
it send a zephyr as usual. That seems somewhat less reliable, and
also less Gnomey to me.
HOTD Design Choice
The Discovery documents also mention startup "hints of the day" or
somesuch, which Gnome has existing support for.
I don't think we should use them. I think they are very cheesy, and
they annoy me whenever I see a program that uses them. I think that
if a system needs to drop random hints at you in order to be able to
use it well, then the responsible engineer should be thwapped, and the
system redesigned until it doesn't need hints. Also, there would be a
resource commitment to writing all of the stupid messages and keepint
them updated.
I think a much better solution would be to start up the Gnome help
browser, set to an appropriate Athena-specific intro page, the first
time (ever) a person uses Gnome-Athena. They can then turn off this
feature whenever they've finished reading the intro documentation and
feel comfortable enough with the GUI to find standard online help
later if they need it. Writing this documentation properly and
concisely is critical, and should be a required part of our first
public release.
-B.
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Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
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