[207] in Athena User Interface
Re: Session management
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Wed Jun 21 09:50:12 2000
Message-Id: <200006211350.JAA24987@w20-575-42.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 09:50:08 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
So I just fiddled with Thomas' laptop and his Debian Gnome install.
There are a number of serious bugs in the AUI build of the session
manager, and some ookie technical issues we've only just uncovered.
(DND seems to be broken in some circumstances, we discovered that
Emacs and perhaps other programs interact badly with session
management, and auto-detection of running programs may be broken in
our build.) I can try to find a working build (presumably things will
work on dig-dug which has a vanilla Helix Code install) in order to
separate the technical bugs from the UI ones.
There's also the larger issue of how I think that novice users will be
completely bamboozled by the system as it's set up. Before I start
bug testing, I'd like to get more background on best practices in this
area, and try to come up with a better user requirements definition.
(At least I know that this system fails to meet at least *one* user's
requirements. 8)
This task, however, is falling off the top of my stack. I have a
backlog of other important draft designs to finish editing and get out
to the list, and a ton of office suite stuff to do. So while I
hope people can chime in with more information about what people want
out of this sort of thing, why it's currently designed the way that it
is, and what alternatives they think people would like, I'm going to
put this on the back burner until at least next week.
-B.
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Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
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