[465] in Athena User Interface
Let the testing begin!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Mon Oct 23 08:31:40 2000
Message-Id: <200010231231.IAA02676@Press-Your-Luck.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU, sbjones@MIT.EDU, kcahill@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 08:31:36 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
The gtest account is pretty much all set up now. Anything state in
that account may be reset at any time. If you want to make permanent
changes, you should do so in /mit/aui/evaluation/gtest. (Please
document your changes...I haven't set up version control there yet;
feel free to do so, as it would make my life easier. 8)
To reset the gtest account after use:
0.) Log in as gtest.
1.) rm -rf `ls -A /mit/gtest | grep -v OldFiles`
2.) cp -r /mit/aui/evaluation/gtest/ /mit/
3.) Log out.
I've pre-fetched certificates for gtest, set up the menus, changed the
some of the default applications to run on attempting to open files
(e.g. gedit instead of emacs) and whatnot. Here's what's not done:
- Test startup sequence on a cluster machine to see if the relative
priorities of sawfish, panel, and gmc need to be adjusted
- Apply AFS patches to gmc
- Propagate changes made in gtest account to system defaults
(Then again, gmc has sooooo many UI bugs, maybe the AFS thing isn't
that important anyway.)
I turned on menu icons again. In your own use of AUI, if you are not
seeing menu icons and want to, open ~/.gnome/Gnome/ and make sure this
line is not set to "false":
Menus_have_icons=true
If you would like to get the new menu system for your personal use,
just copy /mit/gtest/.gnome/apps into ~/.gnome/apps. I'll be
harmoning the new system with getdot when I get a chance.
Two things I didn't change that we still might want to:
1.) Emacs is still the default editor when you "comp" or "repl". It
could be changed to gEdit, but that would break text-only logins. We
*could* make a little script that starts gedit under X and emacs on
text logins. It could even tell users to exit the program when they're
done composing their and type "send" at the prompt (or hit Enter for
more options). (This will perhaps be less of an issue once we get
Evolution.)
2.) We previously decided on "first click focuses the window, second
click presses the button in the window". Personally, I find this
quite annoying. I'm curious whether many test subjects will, too.
Alternatively, the danger was that subjects would click on a window
(trying to raise or focus it) and be surprised when the click got
passed to the application and a button was pressed or something. (I
don't find this likely.) Something to watch for, I guess.
I think that's all for now. I'm mostly hosed for the rest of the
week, but am still willing to deal if case there are problems. Let me
know if anyone wants to start testing in the Usability Lab proper, and
I'll do the Linux-Athena install on the machine in there.
Oh, and please do send comments on the new menu layout if you get a
chance to use/play with it. 8)
-B.
===============================================================
Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project
http://www.votenader.org
===============================================================
