[311] in Athena User Interface
Re: Current thinking on gZephyr
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ariel E Segall)
Fri Jul 21 11:30:26 2000
Message-Id: <200007211530.LAA17431@tir-na-nogth.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 21 Jul 2000 10:39:37 EDT."
<200007211439.KAA03235@snert.ihtfp.org>
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 11:30:21 -0400
From: Ariel E Segall <ariels@MIT.EDU>
It's been suggested to me by a friend not on this list that one way of
dealing with the easy-to-understand vs compatible-with-zephyr-standard
problem would be to simply include brief explanations in the interface.
Something along the lines of a tooltip that popped up when you held the
mouse over "Class", reading "A class is generally a group of people you
want to send a message to. Defaults to class message. For more information
and exceptions, look up 'Classes' in the Help section."
Admittedly, the second part of the suggestion was to have the command
for turning off the tooltips require reading through the more in-depth
explanations of zephyr (or just knowing what you're doing) which may
be a little more heavy-handed than we'd like, but it's still an interesting
idea.
I have every intent of shipping gzephyr out with very in-depth and clear
documentation, if i can pull it off, including a "what on earth is this
zephyr thing anyway" section. I don't actually know how many people
would bother reading it, even if there was a little popup hint that told them
where to look. I don't actually particularly object to the idea of a beginning
user being able to send to individuals and the classes his friends have
told him about, and have to read something to really understand what's
going on. Or even read the "Starting to use zephyr on athena" section before
doing that, to set up their .anyone file. On the other hand, that's the
perspective of an experienced user operation on the assumption of decent
help files.
As far as getting some of the dotfile-editing stuff into a more user-friendly
format, I'm working on it. Subscriptions at the very least should be handled
by gzephyr.
Ariel
P.S.- for the subscriptions, I was thinking that having a default
recipient of * (as opposed to the %me% which zctl uses... i'm not entirely
sure why, since sending to individuals on classes is not very common in
my experience) would be a good idea, and make more sense to confused frosh.
I'm a believer in sensible defaults for people who don't want to understand
the entire system. Opinions?
