[310] in Athena User Interface
Re: Current thinking on gZephyr
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Aurora Anne)
Fri Jul 21 10:39:48 2000
Message-Id: <200007211439.KAA03235@snert.ihtfp.org>
To: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
Cc: aui@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 21 Jul 2000 10:04:20 EDT."
<200007211404.KAA01011@egyptian-gods.mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 10:39:37 -0400
From: Aurora Anne <aurora@MIT.EDU>
>I am very concerned by the idea that users may have different ideas of
>how zephyrs are distributed based on what client they use. The names
>"class" and "instance" are pretty stupid, but I think we should
>consider ourselves stuck with them.
The names class and instance are a documentation nightmare (as is most
of zephyr now, actually). I'd love to see them change to something
that makes even the vaguest amount of sense to the average user.
Believe it or not, Zephyr is one of the hardest Athena things to
document because of the "stupid" names and confusing commands. MOst
users already don't understand what is going on. I'm not sure it
really would induce much more confusion to change the names on one
platform, especially if we did it right.
We could easily have the gui list the old names in parenthesis (and
even in a smaller font) below or beside the new name. That would fail
to confuse old users and new users would have a shot at a more
intuitive understanding of what's going on. When new users switch
platforms they will hopefully have seen the old names listed in the
gui and they'll seem familiar. We can also document it and encourage
the switchover on other platforms.
Can't we take this opportunity to do some more user friendly things?
Please?
We could call classes and instances by something that makes sense,
control subscriptions and things done now through the .Xresourcces
file (colors, location, fonts etc...) through a gui and generally make
life less confusing. It would be great. Users could do the things
they want to do *and* actually have a clue what is going on. It would
make it a lot less tempting to just copy somebody elses dotfiles.
Heather Anne
