[291] in Athena User Interface
Chooser, apparent gmc/exmh consensus
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Tue Jul 18 23:33:15 2000
Message-Id: <200007190333.XAA10410@oxyacetylene.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 23:33:11 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
On the program chooser:
So it turns out that gmc already has a built-in "program chooser." I
suspect that Nautilus will give us something similar, as well. We'll
have to wait and see.
The list-of-lockers question though, is Athena-specific. What I'm
hearing seems to be that we should do this in documentation, but
perhaps with a prominent link from the GUI interface. I would be
satisfied with that, considering that we'll know from user feedback if
that is insufficient. Any last thoughts on that?
Regarding the file manager and mail reader:
After much debate in the Zone, we seem to have reached a tentative
consensus regarding mail reader and file manager placement. In the
public aui-beta release, they will be available in generic lists of
"Mail readers" and "Utilities" or whatever the specific categories
turn out to be.
In formal usability testing, they may be placed more prominently
(i.e. on the panel's taskbar) for certain runs.
The general issue is that Nautilus and Evolution, the preferred mail
reader and file manager, respectively, probably won't be ready until
the middle of the fall term. There are a number of competing
applications in both these areas which are worth contenders for Athena
default, so a brief re-evaluation process should occur when these
applications do become available. Also, there is an ongoing Discovery
project with regard to the shape of future IMAP support at MIT, the
results of which should be taken into consideration.
-B.
P.S. - The gu account is being configured for usability testing.
Please let me know before nuking/hacking dotfiles there. It should
also now be zlocatable when someone is using it.
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