[370] in Athena User Interface
Re: Beta, system, and usability testing, p.s.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Wed Aug 16 18:14:32 2000
Message-Id: <200008162214.SAA07712@No-Whammies.mit.edu>
To: "Susan B. Jones" <sbjones@MIT.EDU>
cc: usability-team@MIT.EDU, debby@MIT.EDU
cc: aui@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: The events that comprise the history of the universe.
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 18:14:27 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
> When I logged in I got two xterm windows plus the gnome bar (and of course
> the Console window). So I thought I could maybe make at least one of the
> xterm windows go away by clicking on something in the gnome bar. So I
> clicked on the terminal with a big red X on it. (I'm a new user...) This
> did not have the desired effect. I got another xterm window instead of
> killing the old one.
The "big red X" icon is actually the one for a regular Xterm, not for
gnome-terminal (which does pretty much the same thing except has
pulldown menus and other features). But this is one reason PSB is
cooking up a nice, intuitive icon. 8)
> Having the goodnoght moon logout button on the far right is a very good
> clue that it's the logout button and makes the icon less confusing except
> that it still looks like it's the Sleep icon and not the logout.
Agreed.
> When this is realtime, will it still open with an xterm window open
> or just the gnome bar and a blank deskptop?
It should open with a *single* xterm. There's an extra one in there
during development in case Gnome fails to start properly.
> Will I be able to file stuff on my desktop as I do on my Mac and PC?
Theoretically, you can, but as I understand it, only if gmc (or your
favorite file manager?) is running. We're not putting any icons on
the desktop by default, and I don't know how much we're going to
encourage/support it. Other people seem afraid that people will be
confused about exactly where the files exist in the file tree.
Personally, I'm on the fence. Maybe it would be a good idea to talk
about this in person, as there are a lot of subtle issues on both
sides.
> How do I find my directories? Do I have to go inbto an xterm window? I
> think that's one of the first things that I might want to do.
Until Nautilus (the graphical file manager) is installed, you'd need
to use an xterm, yes. If the software is released in November as
hoped, it may be that it's included in the IPO. 8)
If you want to see a bad example of of graphical file manager, type
"gmc &" at the athena% prompt. You'll find many usability problems
with it, I'm sure, which is why we're not going to offer it to Athena
users at large, and why it's being replaced.
> Would it be better to put the *Office word processor on the bar
> instead of or along with Emacs? As powerful as Emacs is for power
> users, for a new comer, it's intimidating.
I'm not sure. I think it might depend on the state of the software
world at the time we go public.
Things Emacs has going for it:
- It starts up fast (certainly relative to Star Office)
- It's a Unix staple, and some people are going to have to learn it
anyway (especially anyone who does programming)
- It does *everything*. No, really. 8)
- It's the only reasonable alternative right now for novice users
over dialup.
But as you say, it's really hard to use. I myself hated having to
learn all of its arcane keybindings and weird way of doing things.
(Now, of course, I'm used to it.)
I actually spent some time earlier this summer looking at possible
alternatives. There's "gedit" (you can run this from the prompt)
which is Gnome's answer to Notepad. I don't like it, mostly because
it doesn't do wordwrap correctly. It also doesn't have some useful
features I use in Emacs - like playing with indentation and
justification. (I also use Emacs a lot to code HTML, Perl, and other
programming languages, so maybe I'm a bad example.) But then again,
most of these features aren't accessible to most people in Emacs
because they don't know how to use them.
Personally, I'm inclined to suggest putting XEmacs there instead.
(add xemacs; xemacs&) It has most or all of the features that vanilla
Emacs does, but with a saner menu system, icons for the most frequent
operations. But it has the same keybindings Emacs does, which is
probably is a plus, if you want to teach people how to use Emacs
gently. On the other hand, due to the many similarities (including
the name) there's a large possibilty for user confusion, having two
similar-but-not-exactly-the-same applications. In it's favor, it's
already recommended in OLC Answers as a user-friendly alternative to
Emacs, not that many people actually go reading there.
It would be useful to get your opinion on what would be the best "I
just want to make some short edits to this file" application.
Certainly, Star Office is the appropriate choice for doing any serious
amount of word processing (like writing a paper). Some people may
just want to use it for Emacs even for the small tasks.
Unfortuantely, the new and less buggy version of Star Office (5.2) is
a monolithic application which can take up to two minutes to load over
the network. But there's this OpenOffice.org project, which is going
to take Star Office, split it into components, and integrate it with
Gnome. (Yay!) Star Division is working away on this as we speak;
maybe there will be something we can run by our presumed IAP public
beta.
Currently, my vote would be for XEmacs, but I'd be interested in
hearing other people's opinions.
Off the top of my scattered head,
Beland
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Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
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