[485] in Athena User Interface
AUI Usability meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Wed Nov 22 22:01:37 2000
Message-Id: <200011230301.WAA04365@Press-Your-Luck.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU, sbjones@MIT.EDU, kcahill@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 22:01:34 -0500
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
Notes from Tuesday...
- AUI is trying to start meeting on a regular basis. The best time
for people that I've asked on Thursdays is 12-3pm.
- At the next meeting, we'd like to address the question of
transitioning the faculty to the new menu system. What will be
required of the Faculty Liasons and of AUI to meet academic needs?
Oliver and Abby will hopefully be able to make our next meeting.
Of particular concern are submenus for particular classes. I'd
also like to resolve the question of whether or not to make a
"Dash" menu in the Gnome tree for backwards compatibility.
- We'd also like to start discussing details of menu interoperability
with Project Pismere. Trying to bridge the Windows/Unix gap with a
single, coherent organizational structure might have big
implications for our menu groupings. Someone (I volunteer) should
talk to Tom Thornton if he can't make our next meeting.
- We did an informal test of my menu scheme on Kathy, with cards. As
a result, we're fine-tuning the testing method, and making the
following pre-emptive changes to the menu system:
- Breaking up the Applets menu and distributing its members to the
appropriate places in the other menus.
- Tweaking the names of the Graphics submenus.
- Changing "Writing and Publishing" to "Desktop Publishing"
- Moving "renew authentication" to the top-level
People agreed that "Productivity" was rather vague, but we weren't
able to come up with an obvious alternative on the spot. People
are going to play with the menus and suggest improvements if they
see any. Other trouble spots were Help/Info, Academics, and
Utilities, though I guess we'll wait for test results before
fiddling too much with those.
Susan and I ran through the test sequence using a local install of
Nautilus on itlab.mit.edu. I'm going to tweak the setup a little bit
for final testing, including enabling desktop icons. I also gathered
information, including these bugs:
- Killing or restarting nautilus (with "punt nautilus", "nautilus
--restart", or killing with the window manager) can take a long time
and eat lots of CPU cycles while doing it. If you try to kill -9
the remaining processes while they are shutting down, or you try to
start a new copy of nautilus before they are done, your entire
session will crash and you have to log in again. Closing normally,
with the internal menu system or "close" or the X button in
Sawfish, appears to cause a swift, clean exit.
- AFS permissions are not properly respected. AFS will let you
read/write a file if you are on the ACL and the owner's bits are
set to allow read/write. Unfortuantely, Nautilus ignores the ACLs,
and in most situations, won't give you access unless the group
and/or other bits allow you to read/write.
- Carriage returns are not ignored in URLs when you cut-and-paste
them in.
- Something that looks like an editor is started when you open a
plain-text file, but it actually isn't.
- Arrow keys and Page Up/Page Down don't work.
- A page full of images won't layout properly until you right-click.
I'll be reporting these formally to the developers as soon as I get a
chance.
Mohammad <sharari@mit.edu> in the IT Lab is curious when we'll be
coming in to do testing. I'll send mail when I successfully make the
menu and config changes I mentioned, which will hopefully be later
tonight (I'm mostly done, but have to go run some errands now). The
gtest account will be in some small flux until then.
BTW, Nautilus already looks like a good platform for an integrated
help system. It's also generally all-around cool and nifty and
user-friendly. Yay! The developers are also quite responsive to bug
reports; I'm optimisitc that the important bugs we've discovered will
be fixed in 1.0.
Thanks, all!
Beland
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Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project
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