[289] in Athena User Interface
Re: GNOME 2.0: The incredible slipping release date.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Fri Jul 14 17:35:13 2000
Message-ID: <ktPsRyMGgE6e00IJ40@mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 17:34:54 -0400 (EDT)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@eazel.com>
CC: aui@MIT.EDU, Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: <lqpuogy2ao.fsf@pythagoras.eazel.com>
Thanks, Maciej, for a very thoughtful response. Your clarifications
have been most helpful. I apologize for my hyperbole around my concern
of not enough functionality that I care about being shipped in time.
I'll address your other points, and I think we're moving forward well.
I'll try to be specific, but there are some places were I can't be.
> When do you want to show it off?
Currently the people doing the work have been saying, "Let's have a
prototype to show off sometime in August." My reply to them has been,
"Don't go too close to the end of the summer. Otherwise there will be
no workers to implement amendments turned up by usability testing."
So the short answer is the first week or two in August.
Excerpts from mail: 14-Jul-100 Re: GNOME 2.0: The incredib.. Maciej
Stachowiak@eazel. (3617*)
> Nontheless I think gmc is better than what Athena has now, and showing
> that as the short-term solution and a Nautilus preview release as the
> long-term solution should (I hope) make a nice case.
Agreed. We will be making a judgement call on what kind of usability
testing should be done with regards to file manager. Perhaps a
pre-release version of Nautilus would help. Perhaps gmc and some
careful interpretation of user feedback will be sufficient.
Excerpts from mail: 14-Jul-100 Re: GNOME 2.0: The incredib.. Maciej
Stachowiak@eazel. (3617*)
> As Thomas mentioned, it's already way more stable than Mwm (or most any
> other window manager).
If it is more stable than mwm on all three Athena platforms, Sun, SGI,
and Linux, then there will be no problem.
Excerpts from mail: 14-Jul-100 Re: GNOME 2.0: The incredib.. Maciej
Stachowiak@eazel. (3617*)
> Why is "looking like netscape" a flaw? (I'm not denying it is, I'm just
> not sure why you think so).
The principle of "least surprise" operates here. A lot of users can't
tell you the name of the program they are running. Some of them tell
you the wrong one. Two programs, Netscape, and GNOME Help have similar
enough screen displays that the naive users will confuse them. These
are the people who most commonly have trouble, and who do the poorest
job of reporting problems. I will be called on the carpet if the MIT
Help desk has to field lots of calls from people complaining that
Netscape is broken because the keyboard accelarators are missing. (GNOME
Help has Netscape-like buttons but few if any accelerators), or that
tables misdraw, or expected multimedia functionality fails. Part of my
sales pitch for the AUI project was that it would save Help Desk
resources, not cost more.
Our experience is that certain applications, particularly the help
displayer need to be VERY OBVIOUSLY NOT similar to any other
applications.
Our current plan here is to ignore the GNOME help browser, and start up
Netscape pointing it at the GNOME help html pages. The problem with
doing this is that Netscape takes a lot longer to start up, and that
matters too. It would have been a lot better if something that would
not confuse naive users had been deployed initially.
Excerpts from mail: 14-Jul-100 Re: GNOME 2.0: The incredib.. Maciej
Stachowiak@eazel. (3617*)
> If that would involve adjusting the release schedule forwards, I can't
> do that; we will release when ready and no sooner.
What you say is reasonable. I don't want you disrupting your schedule
for one specific site.
What I may ask for is a pre-release snapshot version of Nautilus for a
specific narrow purpose if absolutely necessary to get usability testing
of the proper sort done in mid August.
> I'm willing to advocate the importance of fixing specific bugs you
> mention, or better yet, advocate the integration of your patches to fix
> these problems.
This is precisely the thing we will need.
> Let me know what else would be useful ammunition. You have the attention
> of one of the two people in charge of the next GNOME release, so make
> use of it. :-)
Thank you for your most generous offer. I will ponder this and get back
to you.
-wdc
